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CONSTRAINED 
ATTITUDES 



CONSTRAINED 
ATTITUDES 



FRANK MOORE COLBY 

Author OF "Imaginary Obligations" 




NEW YORK 

DODD, MEAD & COMPANY 

1910 



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111" 



Copyright, 1910 
By DoDD, Mead and Company 

Published November, 1910 



©CI.A275959 



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40 

3 



CONTENTS 

CHAPTER 

I Coram Populo .... 
II On the Brink of Politics 

III Rusticity and Contemplation 

IV The Humdrum of Revolt 
V The Usual Thing . 

VI Impatient " Culture " and 

Literal Mind . 
VII Literary Class Distinctions 
VIII The Art of Disparagement 
IX International Impressionism 
X Quotation and Allusion . 
XI Occasional Verse . 



the 



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Digitized by the Internet Archive 
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The Library of Congress 



http://www.archive.org/details/constrainedattitOOcolb 



CORAM POPULO 



I 

CORAM POPULO 

Sound and able men, no doubt, and men whom 
the nation delights to honour, but what does 
happen to jou as you grasp the pen or mount 
the platform? For many years have I pon- 
dered this strange public diminution of the 
private man, bursting out on the subject now 
and then in print, and to this day I cannot 
read a newspaper, attend an alumni dinner, in- 
cline my mind to thoughts presidential or lead- 
ing citizens' ideals, without a sense of won- 
der. And though sheer bald wonder may 
seem to some to be of small advantage, I do 
assure all who, like me, are sometimes a little 
wearied on these occasions that it helps to pass 
the time. 



CONSTRAINED ATTITUDES 

Newspapers are no less merciless to their 
writers than they are to their readers. It is 
a cruel thing, this system which effaces com- 
pletely the editorial person, good or bad, and 
leaves only a vague " we," meaning the cor- 
poration, or the linotype machines, or the peo- 
ple, or some such bundle of entities, never any- 
body in particular. A sad personal disaster 
behind that corporate "we." Sometimes there 
is the wail of a lost soul in it — somebody try- 
ing to be everybody and all gone to vulgar 
fractions in the process. There are editors 
who think exclusively in "we's," even out of 
office hours, the mind balking instinctively at 
any thought " unlikely to interest our read- 
ers " or unsupported by an " influential por- 
tion of the intelligent public." That is what 
comes of being a mouthpiece and a fourth es- 
tate, and a bulwark, palladium, wholesale 
broker in public opinion, guide, caterer, social 
.4 



CONSTRAINED ATTITUDES 

dynamometer and what not. An editor's soul 
will usually disappear long before it leaves the 
body. 

Editorial expression at present is so imper- 
sonal that nobody seems to matter in the least. 
A massacre in Park Row, provided it did not 
end in pillage, would make little difference in 
those excellent editorial pages. Should the 
murderers pass from Franklin Square (wet 
with the blood of Harper's chivalry) to the 
offices of uptown monthly magazines, pausing 
only to bum the editors of the two admirable 
weeklies which they would pass on the way, the 
carnage, though in a sense deplorable, would 
not seriously affect the characters of the be- 
reaved magazines. A momentary maladjust- 
ment, perhaps, some black-bordered para- 
graphs about an irreparable loss, but soon each 
would be giving to its readers precisely what 
its readers were accustomed to receive. And 
5 



CONSTRAINED ATTITUDES 

but for those same black borders no reader 
would suspect that the " strong personality 
which left its impress on all its pages " had re- 
cently "passed away." I would not bring 
back the times when editors were shot or horse- 
whipped for what they wrote, yet I do miss the 
kind of man whose absence would be noticed if 
by chance somebody did kill him. 

Others have expressed the same feeling of 
loneliness while wandering among the printed 
words of college presidents. I remember, how- 
ever, that one college president did speak out 
on a public occasion about eleven years ago, 
and it caused no small excitement. He ad- 
vised, I think, the social ostracism of wicked 
millionaires. The thought itself was not re- 
markable. It was familiar indeed from sev- 
eral Bible texts. But it did seem a valiant 
thought for a college president. The stand- 
ard of college presidents is not that of other 
6 



CONSTRAINED ATTITUDES 

men; it is more nearly that set by Pericles for 
women. It is not desired that they shall stir 
the public thought or divide the minds of citi- 
zens. The moral and intellectual caution de- 
manded of them in the public gaze has always 
been enormous. A humanly applicable remark 
is a presidential indecency. In contrast to 
the wild turbulence of the home, where Chris- 
tian sentiments may be rudely noised and the 
Ten Commandments flung about without re- 
'gard to whom they injure, the American citi- 
zen has ever turned to the college presidential 
platform as to the centre of repose. No tam- 
pering with conscience from that quarter at all 
events ; no personal application ; no shock from 
collision with a mind in motion. Hence it was 
most natural when this college president applied 
a principle of the Bible to human affairs that a 
thousand editorial writers should begin writ- 
ing passionately at once and that many of us 
7; 



CONSTRAINED ATTITUDES 

should exclaim, The daredevil! Privately he 
would have seemed quite tame and dull; presi- 
dentially he was a madcap. 

Never but once have I been stirred on an im- 
portant college occasion. This was at a Com- 
mencement dinner, where, carried away by my 
feelings, I almost made a speech. This was 
the speech I came near making: 

" It is not often, Mr. President, brother 
alumni, and distinguished guests, that I rise 
to appreciable heights of moral grandeur, but 
I do so now. I stand before you to-night, 
brimming with the spirit of your recent ad- 
dresses. I, too, have my generalities and my 
truisms, and it will do you no harm to listen 
in your turn to my somewhat nasal moral sing- 
song. Through a chain of flowery Junes, 
reaching far beyond the memory of men now 
living, may be traced both the form and the sub- 
stance of your speeches. For no law of nature 
8 



CONSTRAINED ATTITUDES 

seems more sure than this great law of Com- 
mencement gravitation, whereby it is ruled that 
the heavy bodies of like " distinguished sons " 
shall fall in like manner upon their subjects. 
Such is the force of tradition, and this is the 
traditon of June, that for many days the minds 
of our youth shall be soused in the cant of their 
elders and a land already drugged with opti- 
mism shall again be overdosed. But a time- 
honoured tradition, gentlemen, is not necessar- 
ily a good tradition, as we know from that 
most ancient and best beloved of human insti- 
tutions, the lie. Here let us pause to consider 
the peril concealed in what may be called Amer- 
ican college platform English, that is to say, 
the large, loose, general and roseate language 
you have just now employed. It is ambigu- 
ous ; there is room in it, alas ! for wicked things. 
Your alma mater has grown richer; so has the 
lie. She has a larger entering class than in 
9 



CONSTRAINED ATTITUDES 

any past year of her history; so has the lie. 
She has added several new courses, each with 
an endowed professorship; so has that older 
but no less progressive institution, the lie — * 
that incomparable alma mater by your own 
tests of alma-maternity, for are not her alumni 
the most numerous, the most glorious and the 
most loyal of them all? For the tests are still 
only success and numbers. Still that doxol- 
ogy of success and numbers. Still after fifty 
Junes the young man " going forth into the 
world" may learn from his oratorical elders 
only the piety of success and the wisdom of 
numbers. The " plain people " still perceive 
that your Commencement exhortation will, after 
drawing off the water, yield only that. I rise 
for one moment on the backbone of this repub- 
lic to inquire, Is this well ? " 

These ringing words were not spoken and 
perhaps it is as well that they were not, for the 
10 



CONSTRAINED ATTITUDES 

mysteries of college eloquence are not for me 
to solve. 

But the charms wrought by educators on 
other educators' and on those whom they have 
educated are after all not nearly so strange as 
the magic words of Chief Executives. What 
spells were once cast, for example, by Presi- 
dential language such as this : " Purity in poli- 
tics is laudable, and if we would be good citi- 
zens we must insist on good laws, and what 
this country needs is manly men (equally, of 
course, womanly women, for woman is very im- 
portant; so is the home), and if we are poor, 
let us not envy the rich, and if we are rich let 
us not despise the poor, for a man's a man for 
a' that, and our lives should be both strenuous 
and simple, and let us take for our constant 
example the youth who bore through snow and 
ice the banner with the strange device, U-pi- 
dee, i-da." Where are these wildfolk, clad in 
11 



CONSTRAINED ATTITUDES 

goatskins, and possibly anthropophagous in 
taste, whom the mere remark that it Is better 
to be good than bad so strangely moves? I 
have never met a single person who owned to 
any special liking for the thing, although my 
acquaintance Includes some of the simplest 
types of human life as yet known to science. 
No matter how plain and honest our fellow- 
citizen may be, he always appears somewhat 
blase, and passes it on to some one else whom 
he believes to be still plainer. 

It was expected of Presidents, ex-Presidents 
and the like that they would rise in public at 
short Intervals and plead for the home. It 
seemed probable that every future President 
would find that a fixed part of his duties as 
chief magistrate was the almost incessant cham- 
pionship of motherhood. Official praises of the 
home accompanied by bugle calls to domesticity 
were felt to be the country's daily need. That 
12 



CONSTRAINED ATTITUDES 

IS why one ex-President (himself a superb' fam- 
ily man and every inch a husband) paused so 
seldom in his advocacy of the home. That is 
why another ex-President, by no means an emo- 
tional person, once came forward to defend the 
home, braving the slings of cankered club- 
women. Soon or late every leading citizen ad- 
dressed himself in public (a propos of nothing 
in particular) to the absorbing questions, How 
is Woman and How is the Home? Domestic 
as we were already — doing our very best, one 
might fairly say — we were stampeded every 
other day by vague but excited exhortation to 
rally round the home. Hearing for the thou- 
sandth time that they ought to stay at home 
and rear good citizens, a number of American 
club-women retorted somewhat tartly to this 
advice. There is, I have noticed, a certain 
acerbity in the writings of club-women, imply- 
ing that the Cause, though in the main benevo- 
13 



CONSTRAINED ATTITUDES 

lent, has Its forbidding side. One of them, re- 
ferring to the idle habits of Presidents, de- 
clared that she " had heard of families that 
starved because the fathers went fishing all the 
time." Another said, " It is the plea of a man 
who speaks from a purely selfish standpoint, as 
though he were afraid his wife might become a 
club-woman." A third gave warning that the 
sight " of the President of the United States 
galloping over the country urging women to 
bear more children " would " engender the spirit 
of rebellion in the minds of many women." 

While I do not sympathise with the vindic- 
tive spirit of these rejoinders, I believe that the 
anxieties of editors and statesmen on this sub- 
ject are excessive; that the most domestic peo- 
ple under the sun are entitled to their moments 
of self-confidence ; that for days at a time Wo- 
man is safe and the home unshaken ; that even 
in the absence of explicit advice, children would 
14j 



CONSTRAINED ATTITUDES 

be bom and raised, and that meals are cooked 
even in the pauses of oratory. And in not flying 
into print to the defence of the home, let me 
not for one moment be suspected of laxity. By 
Heaven ! I should as soon think of hauling 
down Old Glory as of removing from above my 
fireplace that cardboard motto, "God Bless 
Our Home," stitched in worsted. I am opposed 
to cannibalism, polygamy, human sacrifice, the 
areois, polyandry, the suttee, the exposure of 
infants on Mount Taygetus, anarchy and feud- 
alism. Civilisation has my endorsement, and 
the family tie in its hour of need may count 
on me for a word of encouragement. Silence 
on these themes now is no sign of heresy, but 
proof, rather, of a deep conviction that cer- 
tain things may be taken for granted even 
among the people at large. The very plain- 
est of the plain people are not without a cer- 
tain sense of proportion, nor do they lack for 
15 



CONSTRAINED ATTITUDES 

truisms in their daily life. They know that 
the kitchen will subsist though undefended by 
a leading citizen, and that the nursery is in a 
fair way to hold its own. They know that if 
the home has its renegades it has also its vic- 
tims, and they can reckon up more mere wives 
and utter husbands than they can count va- 
grants from the marriage bond. They have 
seen the family so absolutely a unit that each 
member was socially an abject fraction, and 
many a homelike city in this country has fur- 
nished a case in point; and if men have fallen 
from fatherhood, they can point to many a 
putative citizen who is too much of a father 
for his country's good, and to pairs linked to- 
gether in monosyllabic intimacy who were, if 
anything, too much encouraged by this con- 
stant Presidential and editorial singing of 
Home, Sweet Home. And so considering the 
number and the kind of influences that home 
16 



CONSTRAINED ATTITUDES 

ties do resist, they openly defy the most leo- 
nine of club-women to do her worst. 

And lest it appear that I have nothing to 
complain of but a surfeit from these Presi- 
dential champions of the home, let me add a 
political argument, which I have drawn from 
a recent book on English manners. It is writ- 
ten by an American power-worshipper, whose 
admiration of the British widens with the 
square miles of their empire on the map. Eng- 
land, he says, has of late years been ruled by 
a " succession of mighty men," and if put to 
it he would no doubt explain that they were 
mighty because they ruled England- And this 
brings him to an aspect of England to which 
he frequently recurs, as well he may, for it is 
indeed charming. It is the aspect of Eng- 
land as the happy hunting-ground of hus- 
bands, the land where on moderate incomes the 
men have valets and the women hardly any 
17 



CONSTRAINED ATTITUDES 

clothes. For the great capacity to rule, to 
conquer and to colonise may, he thinks, be 
traced directly to the male ascendancy in the 
English home. Groomed, well-fed, exercised, 
never thwarted, and with the wife always in 
her proper place, the English husband is, like 
the fire engine horse, always in the pink of con- 
dition, and ready at an instant's moral alarm 
to rush forth to the most distant part of the 
world and kill a coloured man. This explains 
the British empire, and, per contra, I may add, 
it explains the imperial shortcomings of the 
United States, for here having once provided 
for the wife in that station of life to which it 
has pleased her to call him, and having served 
without offence as handy man about the house, 
the American husband has not the time left, 
still less the spirit, to be off shooting Mata- 
beles. Thus the question of empire is fought 
out in the home, and you often meet a hus- 
IS 



CONSTRAINED ATTITUDES 

band, now utterly domesticated, whose abilities 
might, if his wife would only set them loose, 
make him a colonial goveraor. We have the 
manhood, could it but be disengaged. 

However, these larger cares are not for me 
but only for opinion-moulders, world-work- 
ers, world-pushers, and their kind. Some say 
the nation profits from their language, even 
though no single person does, which is one of 
the mysteries of political arithmetic. Others 
complain that, like swearing, it takes the mean- 
ing out of words, or inflates the moral cur- 
rency, or adds a touch of impotence to old 
familiar truths. Nothing, they say, makes 
concrete sinners feel so safe and sleepy as the 
distant rumble of the Golden Rule. The for- 
eigner in his crude way calls it hypocrisy. To 
what extent it has helped to fill the jails or the 
high places In this country may some day be 
determined by a patient sociologist. But to 
19 



CONSTRAINED ATTITUDES 

the echo-beaten mind of a casual reader it is 
interesting rather as one of the numerous demo- 
cratic liturgies, pen-habits, thought-saving de- 
vices or mental petrifactions which make so 
many public Americans seem allegorical. After 
all, except in public, there are really no such 
men. 



20 



ON THE BRINK OF POLITICS 



II 

ON THE BRINK OF POLITICS 

Some time ago I read a book of an evolution- 
ary cast on the irrationality of politics, in 
which the writer devoted much time and en- 
ergy to proving that political opinions were 
formed generally in the dim twilight of the 
human mind. 

He complained that the student of politics 
spent his time in analysing human institutions 
and neglected the analysis of man. He said we 
ought to know at least as much about man as 
may be learned from a modem text-book on 
psychology. He himself had entered politics 
by way of biology and psychology, passing 
thence directly into laboratory work as a Mem- 
ber of the British Parliament. With admirable 



CONSTRAINED ATTITUDES 

evolutionary modesty he repressed any political 
opinions of his own, noting merely the effect 
of party cries and iterated doctrines on other 
members of his species. He delighted in the 
relative view of things. He liked to trace a 
political emotion back through the savages to 
some fossil horse. 

He usually stopped with these statements 
of kinship, leaving it to us to make the applica- 
tion. Occasionally, however, he did offer a 
practical suggestion. There was, for example, 
the common bond between cats and business 
men, between property-owners and squirrels, 
magpies and dogs. He desired some econom- 
ist to write a treatise on the- question. Would 
the property instinct " die away if not in- 
dulged " ? 

But as a rule he did not go beyond the proof 
of ancestry, for he was one of those tantalis- 
ing social evolutionary persons whose thoughts 
24i 



CONSTRAINED ATTITUDES 

end so completely in zoological circles that you 
cannot tell whether they write for the enlight- 
enment of men or by way of courtesy to the 
lower animals. When he saw a politician, he 
immediately became absorbed in calculating the 
degree of moral credit due to angle-worms. 

The danger of this social-evolutionary habit 
is that one's whole life may slip away in the 
making of zoological comparisons, allowing no 
time for reflecting on what they mean. 
Brought up as we have been in the evolutional 
tradition we are too apt already to be en- 
grossed with unfruitful family resemblances, as 
between housewives and hens, caddis-worms and 
novelists, dogs and savings-bank depositors. I 
myself might easily write a chapter on the 
Functions of Polite Human Conversation That 
Were Once Performed by Tails. I should show 
how men were obliged to say Good-morning, 
because they found they had nothing left to 
25 



CONSTRAINED ATTITUDES 

wag it with, and how a great many social feel- 
ings once expressed without noise but with per- 
fect accuracy by the tail were later driven to 
an oral outlet. Spoken greetings were not 
needed so long as there were tails. A tail de- 
clared that you were glad you could come; 
tails replied that your hosts were glad to see 
you. The time of day in that early period 
was always and effectively passed with the tail. 
Tails extended the early courtesies, hospital- 
ities and good cheer, waved doubtful assent or 
cordial approval, differentiated the welcome of 
a friend from that of a bare acquaintance, suf- 
ficed in short for all the simple social amenities 
now expressed in forms of speech. 

I should dissent from the scholarly Unso- 
weiter's well-known view that the need of artic- 
ulate social sounds for the expression of the 
hitherto-tail-uttered emotions accelerated the 
development of primitive speech-forms. I should 
S6 



CONSTRAINED ATTITUDES 

hold rather with the learned Zumbelspiel's more 
recent studies in " Tail Rhythms and Animal 
Benignity ". that by thrusting upon the lim- 
ited potentialities of primitive tongues the once- 
adequately-tail-performed social duties, the loss 
of the tail may well have retarded the develop- 
ment of more variegated idioms. I should 
agree with him that even in the highest known 
forms of modem society speech is burdened 
with social sentiments which are not only per- 
fectly tail-utterable but could, indeed, be bet- 
ter and less laboriously rendered on that sim- 
pler and more responsive instrument. I should 
point to the misconstruction of social silence, 
the fear of the pause, the social dependence 
on audible signs of animation, and the unjust 
application of the stigma " grumpy " to really 
friendly persons who lack, for the moment, 
speech, but who with tails would, no doubt, in- 
voluntarily express the warmest social feelings. 
27 



CONSTRAINED ATTITUDES 

And I should applaud heartily Zumbeispiel's 
conclusion that it is far too soon, perhaps by 
one and one-quarter million years, for civilised 
man to regard the loss of his earlier and more 
automatic social indicator with any other feel- 
ing than regret. In an appendix I should re- 
produce In a notation of measured tail-beats 
(based on duration and Intensity of vibration) 
many entire conversations overheard at my 
club. I could, as I say, easily write such a 
chapter. I lack only a knowledge of biology to 
make myself well-nigh intolerable. But I shall 
never write It for a reason that seldom deters 
any modem social evolutionist — the reason 
that It seems a rather silly thing to do. 
Besides, I have little doubt that it has been 
already written. 

But to return to the irrationality of politics. 
My writer seemed to think that he was alone 
in regarding politics as Irrational. Again and 
^8 



CONSTRAINED ATTITUDES 

again he would attack the " assumption so 
closely interwoven with our habits of political 
and economic thought that men always act on 
a reasoned opinion as to their interests," This 
seemed to me an assumption that fell down al- 
most as soon as it was stated. 

We do not in our private capacities assume 
that " men always act on a reasoned opinion 
as to their interests " when they vote any more 
than when they marry or when they dance. 
Mad as the world is we are spared that final, 
mind-closing illusion that it is sane. Surely 
there is a deep enough faith in the irrationality 
of our current politics. Even though we 
shrink from the horrid disclosures of self-ex- 
amination there is always a friend to examine 
Who has not gazed giddily at the irrational- 
ity of a friend's politics? But the argument 
was perhaps addressed not to men in their 
private capacities, but to that far lower order 
£9 



CONSTRAINED ATTITUDES 

of beings, men about to appear in public, men 
on the point of mounting platforms, getting 
ready to write leading articles, planning treat- 
ises on social science. For that portion of a 
man which is ready for publication or may be 
found at any time in a political speech such 
language may have a special use — if only as 
a reminder that there is more of him. 

I doubt if there is any such widespread il- 
lusion in private life as to the rationality of 
politics. Publicly we express leadership in 
terms of the leader's ability ; privately we think 
it in terms of the dulness of the led. No one 
needs proof that men rise in politics not be- 
cause they are weighty but because they are 
light ; and the forlorn human tatters to be seen 
at any time floating even in light political 
breezes are the subject of common remark. 
When the strong wind of free silver bore up- 
ward the expanding form of a certain Presi- 
30 



CONSTRAINED ATTITUDES 

dential candidate, we may have hailed in public 
the rise of a statesman, but we were thinking in 
private that almost anything might fly. Nobody 
ever looks inside a Senator to see what makes 
him go ; it is explained by Indiana's utter care- 
lessness or Rhode Island's absence of mind. One 
does not ask his boots how they climbed upon 
the mantel-piece; one knows in heedless times 
that things get out of place. A Senator is 
merely a sign of other people's inattention. We 
may be a little careless in our language, but in 
private life we no more believe in the ration- 
ality of politics than In the rationality of suc- 
cess. Prodigious financial intellects are not 
much admired privately. They are, indeed, ex- 
ceedingly uninteresting. It is only a maga- 
zine writer who can see the signs of power in 
that financially successful face. In private we 
merely see that it looks a good deal like a wal- 
rus, and from what we know about the man 
31 



CONSTRAINED ATTITUDES 

himself we have no reason to think that, apart 
from financial emotions, he did not feel like 
one — one comer of the mind spidery, organis- 
ing, grasping detail, all the rest pure walrus. 
In public we say the race is to the strongest; 
in private we know that a lopsided man runs 
the fastest along the little side-hills of success. 
Mothers still punish their little boys for the 
winning ways of the rising statesman, and there 
is seldom rejoicing in any home when a decent 
all-round baby begins to decay into something 
like a Harriman. In private life these re- 
marks of mine are platitudes; in public think- 
ing they are really quite profound. Approach 
them by way of " social psychology " and you 
will feel that you have penetrated far. 

Nor have we in private life any such faith 
in the rationality of political reformers, as 
might be presumed from our magazines. For 
some years past we have had a chance to ob- 



CONSTRAINED ATTITUDES 

serve closely an unusual number and variety 
of reformers. It has been a period, some say, 
of moral awakening, though as I look back 
upon it, it seems rather a period of journalis- 
tic fits and starts. For it was the era of those 
strange magazine early birds, known as " muck- 
rakers." Many could understand why a muck- 
raker chose his subject, but few could explain 
why he let it drop. 

Apart from any moral consideration, the sud- 
den cessation of many of those interesting mag- 
azine exposures was, I think, a literary injus- 
tice. A picaresque romance of gangs and 
bosses would run through three numbers of a 
magazine, then stop as suddenly as a trust 
prosecution. I acquired at the time quite a 
taste for corrupt aldermen, but the means of 
gratifying It were soon abruptly denied. What 
ever became of those Interesting rascals? And 
how fared it with St. George and the Dragon 



CONSTRAINED ATTITUDES 

' — and that affair between Ormuzd and Ahri- 
man (pronounced in the magazines Harriman), 
how did it turn out? Often the best things 
happened after the serial had ceased. That 
much I could gather from newspaper de- 
spatches (tantalising bits, no real story), but 
search as I would I could find no magazine 
narrator resuming the thread of his plot. The 
final " graft " trial in San Francisco had, for 
example, according to the newspapers, a courb 
record of four million words, — a mine of " vital 
human interest," moral throbs and devilry, bet- 
ter material than went to the making of the 
whole San Francisco corruption magazine se- 
ries down to the day it stopped. Assassina- 
tion, suicide, perjuries and plots, theft of doc- 
uments, bribing and out-bribing, corruption 
never so thick, lying never more ample — what 
more could one wish.^^ Yet not one good con- 
secutive magazine story of it during the year — 
34 



CONSTRAINED ATTITUDES 

San Francisco's best year for literary purposes. 
Observe that this criticism Is merely literary. 
Let others take the civic measure of those mag- 
azine reformers, early moral minute-men, muck- 
rakers, demi-socialists, whatever they were 
called. I dare say it may have been reform, 
for all it looks now so much like flirtation. I 
blame them here only as traitors to the com- 
mon curiosity, who from having overdone many 
beginnings cheated us out of some very inter- 
esting consequences. 

And what befell the reformers themselves? 
Apparently the republic has forgotten even the 
names of many muckrakers, quite famous in 
their time. No one seems to know what they 
have been doing since. Swallowed up some- 
where in popular magazinedom, deeply ab- 
sorbed doubtless, but in what diverse things? 
It is an idle speculation, but I have often tried 
to figure to myself what some typical muck- 



CONSTRAINED ATTITUDES 

raker has probably been up to since " graft " 
became obsolete for magazine uses, though 
lively enough elsewhere. I can guess him only 
from his magazine's contents. Perhaps he was 
caught first in that timely balloon ascension. 
Perhaps he took a turn next with the negro 
problem or with Abraham Lincoln when those 
two topics plunged again into the "public 
eye.'* Perhaps the Emmanuel Movement drew 
him. Call anything a Movement and he would 
be likely to try and run with it a little way. 
He must have made several dabs at Prohibition 
as it fell in and out of the " public eye." The 
accident to the "public eye" occurs, by the 
way, very systematically in popular magazine 
journalism and must not be confounded with 
the burning of questions. A " burning ques- 
tion" may not appear for two or three num- 
bers, and it seldom bums for more than four; 
whereas the " public eye " is continuously get- 
36 



CONSTRAINED ATTITUDES 

ting people and things in it, being an aston- 
ishingly open feature that never blinks for man 
or insect. Probably most muckrakers went 
straight into public eye work, taking things 
just as they came — aeroplanes, poets' birth- 
days, the direct primary, benzoate of soda, 
woman's suffrage, war on house flies — happy in 
a variety that conformed to a natural coquetry 
of intellect. A few deeper natures preferred no 
doubt the slower round of the "burning ques- 
tion " — ^Is New York sufficiently religious ? — ■ 
How about a college education? Even this 
seems giddy enough. Fancy a life that hangs 
precariously on the first blushes of " burning 
questions," if I may mix a few figures of 
speech. Think of the danger of becoming in- 
terested, of carrying last year's enthusiasm 
over into this, of the hair-breadth escapes from 
last month's deepest convictions. There is al- 
ways the risk that a man may retain some ra- 
37, 



CONSTRAINED ATTITUDES 

tional continuity of interest, utterly out of 
place in a popular magazine, likely, indeed, to 
wreck it. An ex-muckraker must have success- 
fully dropped at least fifty subjects within two 
years just in the nick of time to save their be- 
coming food for reflection. As I said before, I 
do not know the life, but am merely guessing at 
it from the magazines. It seems a hazardous 
sort of intellectual wild-life not without a cu- 
rious interest. It is odd that no one should 
have thought of tracing the course of some 
muckraker since he disappeared. 

But cock-crow journalism has at least a 
cheerful meaning to those who practise it, en- 
dowed, as they doubtless are, with temperaments 
of tough fibre and good spring, dominating 
routine, disguising perfunctoriness, looking 
forward to new subjects as to meals, sure of an 
appetite. Nor can it be denied that a buoyant 
enough mind may experience all the excitements 
of epoch-making, even when merely taking 
38 



CONSTRAINED ATTITUDES 

notes on the accouchement of the present mo- 
ment. And if there is no great zest for the 
present subject there is always the joy of es- 
caping the one before, and above all there is 
the sense of motion, of new births, new dawns, 
new movements, signs of the times, moral awak- 
enings, sentimental earthquakes, and the gen- 
eral mountainous parturition of the mouse-like 
little particular. Not such a bad life after all 
— perhaps as good as journalism has to offer 
— and if one could by wishing transform him- 
self into a successful writer he might do worse 
than change places with one of these same 
volatile reformers, punctual seers and quick 
forgetters, who can always have an early morn- 
ing feeling, no matter what the time of day — 
glad hearts bursting with important moral 
announcements, like canary-birds whose song 
hails with an equal rapture the breaking of 
day and the running of the sewing-machine, 

89 



RUSTICITY AND CONTEMPLATION 



Ill 

RUSTICITY AND CONTEMPLATION 

Sensitive folk, who shudder at the bustling 
" modem spirit," majorities, millionaires, mo- 
tor cars, popular fiction, Sunday newspapers, 
imperialism, giant strides, nervous tension, ma- 
chinery and like matters, who think the love of 
beauty dead or dying, art on the wane, " Cul- 
ture " a forlorn hope, and taste commercially 
tainted, might take heart if they would look 
about and count the equally sensitive noses. 
They are a minority, to be sure, but a lusty 
one and exceedingly voluble. Consider the 
journalism of gentle contemplation. I have 
lately read more tender little open-air reveries, 
praises of Nature, praises of the soul, primrose 
reflections, shy musings, upland dreams than I 
43 



CONSTRAINED ATTITUDES 

could mention, some of them in books, some in 
the magazines, but many of them in the news- 
papers, even the coarse, pragmatical, money- 
minded newspapers. The journalism of gentle 
contemplation has become a profession in it- 
self. Consider the remarkable increase and 
multiplication of good little Professor Wood- 
side alone. Add to the books written by Pro- 
fessor Woodside the books that might as well 
have been written by Professor Woodside; add 
to these the woodnotes and general reflections 
of all the periodicals, especially the quiet 
thoughts of British periodicals about friend- 
ship, eventide, charity, an old churchyard, 
downs, lanes, hedgerows, wild violets, choughs, 
rooks, rabbits, or a sunset — and the murmurs 
of quiet meditation will swell to something of 
a roar. For literary seclusion is wonderfully 
prolific and Nature has, these many years, been 
almost mobbed for rustic notes. They are 
4i4i 



CONSTRAINED ATTITUDES 

formidable in numbers and of an amazing una- 
nimity, these fugitives from vulgar modem 
majorities. 

There are hundreds of them writing as one 
man, and they are read by hundreds of thou- 
sands — very naturally, too, for the subjects are 
altogether amiable and the writers' intentions 
good, and we are glad in this kind of writing 
to take the will for the deed, thankful even for 
the bare names of pleasant things. They alle- 
viate the advertisements, financial articles, 
leading articles, and book reviews. " Brook 
trout " sounds grateful after " rate of ex- 
change " or " brokerage," and it is pleasant to 
turn from the man who has unmasked the de- 
signs of Germany in Mumbojumboland to the 
man who has removed four large stones from 
a hill-top and uncovered a stormy petrel sit- 
ting on her eggs. But the stormy petrel man 
is far prouder than his brother of Mumbojum- 
45 



CONSTRAINED ATTITUDES 

boland. His " feeling for Nature " does not 
extend to that hard-worked person in the next 
column, who is plainly just as much a fellow- 
creature as a coot and ought to be as interest- 
ing as a moor-hen, and who if turned loose with 
a note-book might do as well by " Nature's 
secrets " as he does by those of the Great Pow- 
ers — know when a thing is bosky and when a 
thing is lush, know the wonderful hour that is 
neither night nor day, and the tang of salt air, 
and the skirl of the haw-bird, and the booming 
note of the dugong, and where the bumbleber- 
ries cluster thickest and the wild pomatum 

blooms — do as well by outdoors, in short, as 

I 

the haughtiest of Nature's tuft-hunters. That 
is the vice of rustic and contemplative jour- 
nalism — arrogance and the proud sense of 
personal rarity. 

" The only unity of a Diary," said one of 
them in the Dedication of his Diary of Tender 
46 



CONSTRAINED ATTITUDES 

Thoughts, " IS the personality of the Diarist." 
It was not in the least a diary ; nor had it any 
personal mark upon it. It was a volume of 
trim little papers about many charming and 
beautiful objects, pictures, books, the nightin- 
gale, daffodils, the sea, and clouds — essays in 
gentle emotion and appreciative observation 
which appeared in British newspapers and mag- 
azines. It is a gentleman-like and desirable 
form of professional activity, but as devoid of 
"personality" as any other kind of journal- 
ism — for example, the market quotations. 
Professor Woodside, also, insists firmly on a 
" personality," convinced that a certain smooth, 
sweet, even fluency in praise of quietude, flow- 
ers, brooks, the countryside, beauty, art, the 
ways of God, and resignation, is all his own. 
Yet no man ever stayed so long alike as Pro- 
fessor Woodside's manner. Each one of these 
many writers seems to think that when he has 
47, 



CONSTRAINED ATTITUDES 

achieved a monotone he has expressed a " per- 
sonality." An odd illusion, when one thinks 
how rarely " personality " appears in print. 
There is " personality," I suppose, in the de- 
scriptive writing of Meredith and Hardy, but 
that is literature. In literature men have the 
luck to be born singly; in journalism they are 
sometimes bom in litters, but more generally 
are incubated in very large broods. The jour- 
nalists of gentle contemplation are valued for 
their vocabulary alone. Personally they are 
undistinguishable. 

I wonder if appropriate terms arranged in 
lists as in the spelling-books and followed by 
some single consolatory sentence would not 
serve almost as well. Thus — 

Moor Tender green 

Heather A glint 

Bracken A shimmer 

Gorse Bathed in sunlight 

Curlew Thrush singing 

48 



CONSTRAINED ATTITUDES 

Lark Lonely 

Lazy clouds Freshening breeze 

Purple shadows Lengthening shadows 

Golden haze One by one the stars 

Distant chimes Long-drawn sigh 

A hush Nature breathing 

A cow Vault of heaven 

And as I made my way slowly homeward through 
the deepening gloom, it seemed as if some vast and 
mysterious but friendly power had strewn the soft, 
dark mantle of forgiveness over the world of strug- 
gling men and were whispering tenderly of peace. 

I have found far more loyal Nature-lovers 
in the suburbs than in these literary wilds, and 
I know of a better sort of rustic journalism. 
I once read, for example, an excellent maga- 
zine called Suhurhan Days, which addressed 
itself exclusively to the class known as "com- 
muters," that is to say, men of the monthly 
ticket, same train morning and night, in- 
domitable, amphibious, never a night in town. 
It was not meant for your ten-trip ticket op- 
portunists, who, as is well known, fall into a 
49 



CONSTRAINED ATTITUDES 

lax and desultory suburbanism incompatible 
with sound commutership, but for the men of 
the iron schedule, who do the deed twice daily, 
come what may. They alone, for example, 
could appreciate the sketches of prominent 
*' commuters " who had won fame at one end 
of the tunnel while dining successfully every 
day forty miles from the other end. Careers 
•of that sort are always heartening to a " com- 
muter," teaching, as they do, that home may 
be attained each night and at the same time 
something else accomplished. Such lives shine 
with a double radiance, when there is something 
heroic about merely reaching home. 

Hence the peculiar pleasure of reading in 
Suburban Days about a famous " comedian 
and commuter" (the wonder of his being 
both!) and seeing a picture of his lawn 
and learning that he raised chickens, which 
he " dearly loved." The love he bore those 
50 



CONSTRAINED ATTITUDES 

chickens marks him as a true " commuter " — ' 
who is always trying to raise something on the 
place, and whether It be a hen or a young onion 
it is dearer to him than to other men on ac- 
count of the recurrent periods of enforced ab- 
sence. Continuity will often cool the love of 
chickens, but in a " commuter's " life of bright 
renewals and extremely sudden cessations the 
feeling never loses any of its early warmth. 
And so it is with Nature generally, despite the 
sneer of a recent writer that the " commuter's " 
" return to Nature is only half way," and that 
he lacks "the perspective of robust rurality." 
No man rushes upon Nature more madly than 
he or when torn away plucks from her a greater 
variety of little keepsakes, bouquets of chick-- 
weed, boutonnieres of beet tops, as may be seen 
on any morning train, proofs that if the re- 
turns to Nature are brief they are at least pas- 
sionate. Your professional Nature-lover, who 
51 



CONSTRAINED ATTITUDES 

mails his manuscripts from her bosom, could 
not find her in the suburbs at all, but the " com- 
muter " can, the keen old zealot of " the wild." 
He noses her out somehow and has as true a 
forest feeling out between the clothes poles 
and the hedge as many a man living in the ut- 
most literary wildness, strewing the dry bed of 
the mountain torrent with the galley proofs of 
his " robust rurality." There is the song of 
the river in his garden hose, and he is as clearly 
Nature's own as Professor Woodside beside his 
trout-stream. And do we love him any the less 
for his greater reticence? 

And Suburban Days, being a well-edited 
magazine and true to its policy, saw to it that 
each biography of a great " commuter " should 
refer to time and distance not as obstacles but 
as blessings, for that is the brave tradition of 
the tribe. They give him a chance to read the 
morning papers — those sixty golden miles — 



CONSTRAINED ATTITUDES 

and even to run through the magazines, and 
he usually gets a seat, and he is always there 
almost before he knows it, and the time from 
the front gate to the office door is never the 
two hours of daily fact, but the hour and a 
half of generous faith or some single tender 
memory. Some of his most careful work has 
been done on the way. If a writer, some of his 
best thoughts have come to him on the train. 
Privately I may say that every time a thought 
of any kind has come to me on the train, an 
umbrella or a handbag has somehow floated 
away, but as a " commuter " I should not men- 
tion that. 



53, 



THE HUMDRUM OF REVOLT 



IV 

THE HUMDRUM OF REVOLT 

I BELIEVE Hedda Gabler is generally regarded 
as the most disagreeable of all Ibsen-klnd. She 
has been violently assailed and with equal vio- 
lence "interpreted" any time these twenty 
years. In spite of the attacks and the even 
deadlier explanations, the play has been sev- 
eral times successfully presented on the Amer- 
ican stage. I have happened to see it only 
twice — once with a native actress scolding vine- 
garishly in the title role, and again with a 
Russian lady singing approximate English 
and inventing a character of whom Ibsen had 
never dreamt. Nevertheless the words of the 
dramatist were there, and they spoke for them- 
57 



CONSTRAINED ATTITUDES 

selves through all disguises, holding the inter- 
est of friends and foes alike, Philistines and 
illuminati, the people who thought they knew 
what he meant and the people who did not 
care. No doubt the excellent gentlemen who 
were the most vituperative in the capacity of 
critics were the most enraptured as play-goers. 
For a gift like Ibsen's enlivens these jaded 
folk far more than they are willing to admit. 
Deeply absorbed at the time in the doings of 
the disagreeable characters, they afterward de- 
fine their sensation as one of loathing, and 
they include the playwright in their pious ha- 
tred, like newsboys at a melodrama pelting the 
man in the villain's part. It comes from the 
national habit of making optimism actually a 
matter of conscience, and denying the validity 
of any feeling unless it is a sleepy one. Con- 
science, it would seem, is a moral arm-chair 
heavily upholstered. 

58 



CONSTRAINED ATTITUDES 

Now, of course, if a man's own wits are pre- 
cisely on the level of the modern American and 
English stage, there can be no quarrel with 
him for disliking Ibsen. If there is no lurking 
discontent with our stage and its traditions 
and with the very best plays of Anglo-Saxon 
origin produced in this country during the last 
twenty years, an Ibsen play will surely seem 
a malicious interruption. What in the world 
has a good, placid American audience to do 
with this half-mad old Scandinavian? He 
writes only for those who go to the theatre to 
be disturbed. Instead of beginning with love 
in difficulties and ending with a happy mar- 
riage, he begins with happy marriages and 
ends with the very devil. Considering the un- 
erring sagacity with which all good-looking 
walking gentlemen select their wives, this is 
nothing short of blasphemy. And where are 
the signs by which a plain man may tell the 
59 



CONSTRAINED ATTITUDES 

virtues? The bloom of innocence is not the 
mark of a pure soul, but of no soul at all. The 
more respectable a character, the more apt he 
is to drive somebody to suicide. There are no 
villains to hate. Hate centres on entirely 
blameless people, who do their duty and break 
no commandments, on good husbands. God- 
fearing parsons, leading citizens, and the like 
— safe, practical folk living within the law and 
having the goodness that gets on in the world. 
The vices, according to Ibsen, are often the 
highly successful moralities of the moment, and 
the virtues are seldom quite respectable. He 
is concerned with good and evil as purely per- 
sonal affairs, for which there is no recipe in 
any moral cook-book. He assumes that every- 
body has his own little moral workshop. 

All of which seems commonplace enough to 
those who remain to some degree ferce naturce 
— that is to say, a bit restive under social im- 
60 



CONSTRAINED ATTITUDES 

peratives, or at least mildly inquisitive toward 
the totem poles of the particular horde, clan, 
phratry, " better element," world power, vil- 
lage congregation, club, class, home circle or 
moral chorus, wherein they find themselves im- 
bedded; but it is very baffling indeed to the 
peaceful groupthinker. NotI ing so makes a 
man's head spin as to detach his mind from 
the social mass with which it has coagulated 
in his middle age. And the twinge of an un- 
used spiritual muscle is generally defined as a 
prick of conscience. There is no doubt what- 
ever from the point of view of the best fami- 
lies, the solid citizens, those " whom the nation 
delights to honour," and the " backbone of this 
republic," that the spirit of an Ibsen play is 
immoral, indecent, perverse, and morbid. It 
was his purpose to have it so. Indeed, people 
are not nearly so uncomfortable as he meant 
them to be. 

61 



CONSTRAINED ATTITUDES 

But to return to the ignominious chronicle 
of Hedda Gabler, that needless Norwegian 
joung woman who, after five acts in demon- 
stration of her superfluity, commits suicide at 
the fall of the curtain. No character to speak 
of, no respect for the gods of others or power 
to make a god of her own, a few appetites, but 
without will either to gratify or to subdue 
them, hence buzzing with little discontents and 
self-pityings In foolish maladjustment to the 
predestined pint pot — she is like, well, almost 
anybody at some stage of life, and like a good 
many quite ordinary folk all through, except 
that she killed herself, while they, with no more 
reason, go on living. To be -sure, matters did 
seem rather desperate — married to Tesman, for 
instance, that utter doctor of philosophy, ash- 
man of modem " original research," to be 
found in any American college catalogue. A 
single hour of him is bad enough, as every one 



CONSTRAINED ATTITUDES 

knows who has met him anywhere outside a 
bibliography, for he is the product of that love 
for " German thoroughness " which never asks 
what the thoroughness is all about or what 
other faculty than memory the thoroughgoing 
creature possesses, but gives the name of 
scholar along with goodness knows what pink- 
lined hoods, doctorates, fellowships, chairs, 
stools, alcoves, and pedagogical perches to any 
academic beetle who gathers into shapeless lit- 
tle fact-heaps or monographs the things that 
a scholar would throw away. A life of inces- 
sant wiving and mothering of Tesmans (the 
lower academic organisms breed rapidly be- 
tween monographs) might well stretch out in 
rather appalling eternities, especially to a 
highly strung young woman of the sort that 
demands much and gives nothing. 

For Hedda lacked those impulses which help 
some women to pass the time even when they 
63 



CONSTRAINED ATTITUDES 

have married Tesmans. She had not that fero- 
cious nest-making passion which often serves 
as well to keep a woman busy as romantic love, 
religion, or the spending of money, and which 
might have wreaked itself for forty years on 
dusting Tesman furniture. Nor could she 
throw herself, as women do in our own little 
university Tesmanias, into societies of literary 
endeavour, genealogical congratulation, sex- 
patriotism ; or move in solid phalanx upon the 
works of William Shakespeare, cheered onward 
by the pale but unscathed gentleman in the low 
collar who had read the bard ; or lead " the 
literary life" (short stories with sweet end- 
ings, full of "uplift," for wonderfully homo- 
geneous magazines) ; or read papers at the 
Woman's Auxiliary Annex of that local Sim- 
plified Spelling Lodge of which Tesman would 
assuredly have been an active member. In 
other words, she lacked not only the heroism of 
64 



CONSTRAINED ATTITUDES 

perfect domesticity, but the fire of parochial 
ambition. 

Desperate as the case was, there might have 
been something to do had there been any heart 
for it, but Hedda was one of those sub voce 
insurgents who wait until insurrections become 
respectable — ^would have liked to murder Tes- 
man if murder were in good repute, saw noth- 
ing wrong in adultery, but did think it impo- 
lite. She wanted firebrand joys, if only they 
did not raise the social temperature. She 
thought she had ideas of her own merely be- 
cause she lacked the ideas of other people and 
would like to do a "beautiful deed," the meas- 
ure of beauty being its distance from the stand- 
ard of the neighbourhood. In short, she felt 
the glamour of the unconventional, believing 
even that an intoxicated gentleman, instead of 
being sent home in a cab by those whom he 
annoyed by his stertorous breathing, talked 
65 



CONSTRAINED ATTITUDES 

like an Horatlan ode, or danced blithely, " with 
vine leaves in his hair," on a Grecian vase in 
bas-relief. So Lovborg seemed to her a man 
who lived his life, which he passed either in 
getting drunk or being petted by women for 
staying sober. He happened to be a man of 
talent, too, but she cared little for that, valu- 
ing him merely as a fallen angel. But he, 
though glad enough to take Byronic advan- 
tage of any fallen angel point of view of any 
pretty woman, and liking the " vine leaves in 
his hair " and other euphemisms, turned for 
any real help in his work to another sort of 
woman, one less fearful of her neighbours' 
tongues. Hedda envied the other woman's in- 
fluence, but would not have paid the other 
woman's price. 

How to have a hand in Lovborg's life with- 
out doing anything for Lovborg, how to be a 
power in her little world along the line of least 
66 



CONSTRAINED ATTITUDES 

resistance? Well, she could at least keep him 
in his fallen angel state, and by encouraging 
him to drink and burning his manuscript show 
herself not altogether impotent for good or 
evil, and incidentally avenge herself on the 
other woman ; and by urging him to a " beau- 
tiful deed " — that is, to kill himself — she could 
do something for the picturesque. Nobody 
need know, and her revolt against circum- 
stances being a private affair, she would still 
be respectable. But circumstances shifted, and 
she must either figure in a vulgar scandal or 
do the bidding of an intriguing admirer, who 
had found her out. So she killed herself, fol- 
lowing still the line of least resistance. Never 
was suicide less horrifying. So little of value 
was there in her that it seemed less like taking 
human life than like removing debris. Her 
soul, if she ever had one, had long since gone 
to the button-moulder. 
61 



CONSTRAINED ATTITUDES 

And who is there for us to praise or blame 
and of what use is a play unless we come away 
praising or blaming somebody and reassured 
in all the sentiments we had about us when we 
first went in? Is the stage a place for sheer 
blank wonder why people live at all or why 
there are so many of them — like the piazza of 
a summer hotel? For this poor lady was be- 
yond the nourishment of either the good or the 
bad. She had no heart for keeping the Com- 
mandments nor any heart for breaking them, 
and at no point can we say things would have 
been better had she done other\vise, but only if 
she had been resouled or reborn or not born at 
all. Therein she resembles a host of techni- 
cally good and useful persons, save that she 
felt the tedium of personal vacancy, whereas 
they quite forget it in the dust raised by a 
thousand and one enigmatic social activities, 
buying and selling, despatching details, whirl- 
68 



CONSTRAINED ATTITUDES 

ing around at the world's business of keeping 
the world as it is, feeling no private incentive 
whatever while pushed along by the little pro- 
prieties. 

But if the law of other people seems not to 
fit one's own peculiar soul, it does not follow 
that one can flourish on the bald denial of It. 
That is the simple faith of the clever few, who, 
hating a crowd, think wisdom the mathematical 
converse of what the crowd thinks, and truth 
a negative adverb, and wit merely the longest 
perpendicular distance from the axis of the 
commonplace, and so, by taking a bee-line 
away from the obvious, arrive in disconcert- 
ingly large numbers at the North Pole of com- 
monsense. They believe with Hedda that the 
beauty of the deed lies in its shock to the neigh- 
bourhood, confounding the love of truth with 
a sort of agoraphobia, substituting one form- 
ula for another, but living by formula, never- 
69 



CONSTRAINED ATTITUDES 

theless. Surely people never seem so much 
alike as when at particular pains to seem dif- 
ferent — ^witness the family likeness between 
men with long hair. It is as hard to find an in- 
dividual in the most advanced group of devil- 
worshippers as in the Main street Baptist 
Church. It is not the size of the group or its 
moral code, but the extent to which it has di- 
gested you that decides the question whether 
your soul is your own. Pioneering spirits re- 
quire a surprising degree of unanimity on their 
exclusive planes. Hedda was merely a me- 
chanical dissenter. She might have been a 
brilliant essayist, paradoxical playwright, 
iconoclastic minor poet, if she had only known. 
But Ibsen killed her, thinking it perhaps the 
happier ending. 

The lesson in it for me is that there is no 
lesson, and the pleasure of it is merely that of 
intimacy with a fellow-mortal, to a degree sel- 
7Q 



CONSTRAINED ATTITUDES 

dom permitted off the stage, and never allowed 
upon it by any modem English-speaking play- 
wright who knows on which side his bread is 
buttered. For years the allegorical procession 
has trooped along behind the footlights, laud- 
able characters beautifully rewarded, ladles re- 
penting in the nick of time, knaves duly pun- 
ished, tender babes, rugged cowboys of ster- 
ling worth, brusque but well-meaning uncles, 
wayward sons with hearts in the right place, 
and wives either resisting temptation or yield- 
ing to it at their peril, and never one of them 
having any life apart from their moral mis- 
sion to me. As a play-goer I have done noth- 
ing but learn my lessons, and have seldom met 
a human being, even a disagreeable one. As a 
play-goer I have learned to be monogamous, 
an upholder of the hearth, almost an andiron. 
The theatre in the course of fifteen years has 
taught me not to marry the adventuress, or to 
71 



CONSTRAINED ATTITUDES 

pass myself off as the real heir, or to poison 
the lady's mind against my rival, or to specu- 
late with my sister's trust funds, or to marry 
the wrong person before I know that the ob- 
ject of my affections is really dead, or to throw 
my life away merely because the letter did not 
reach me in the mail. I hate assassins and I 
give self-evident hypocrites a piece of my mind. 
I never run away with anybody except with 
the most honourable intentions. All this and 
much more I have learned as a play-goer, but 
as a person I have hardly ever seen another 
person on the American stage, and have no 
reason to expect that any practical playwright 
will ever permit me to do so. Hence the sur- 
prise and pleasure of the recognition — espe- 
cially when it comes about through an unpre- 
possessing old Norseman, shorn of all native 
charm by translation, unblessed by humour in 
any form, and expecting every man to bring 
his own philosophy. 

72 



CONSTRAINED ATTITUDES 

But any resolute public thinker can some- 
how draw a lesson from it. Perhaps it is an 
allegory of the wages of sin. Or, if Mr. G. 
Bernard Shaw is your mental executor, you 
will certainly see in it " humanity outgrowing 
its ideals." Or may Hedda not symbolise the 
undoing of the artistic temperament, as an- 
other interpreter has shown? Or the duty of 
adultery.? Or suicide as a pardonable manner 
of exit from married life with a doctor of phil- 
osophy.? Then there is Mr. Roosevelt — is she 
not a plain warning against letting the heart 
stray from the home? And the Prohibition- 
ist platform — had not Lovborg drained the 
fatal cup, Hedda might be living to this 
day, the mother of nine little Tesmans. For 
this old inquisitor-general of all the formulas 
is forthwith translated into many formulas, and 
by the strangest of ironies it has come to pass 
that the self -same Ibsen who cursed people for 
not finding separate ways of their own now 
73 



CONSTRAINED ATTITUDES 

trails behind him a long and solemn file of 
" Ibsenites ^' in accurate locks tep with him- 
self. So hard is it not to commend our souls 
unto our neighbours, or to live a life without 
forming a committee on the rules of living. 
It is a wonder that we still contrive to die per- 
sonally instead of somehow getting ourselves 
collectively adjourned. And assuming the 
chance of a future life, consider the embarrass- 
ment of the sorting angels trying to pick out 
the personal particles as we arrive in our re- 
spective packages — schools of thought and 
squads of taste. Fancy trying to tell which, 
in any essential sense, is which, in a group 
of recent American novelists or business men, 
party leaders, " representative New Yorkers," 
successful playwrights, literary critics (by 
tradition), aristocrats by birth, aristocrats 
by reading Browning, or any of the other 
needlessly agglutinated bundles of public-spir- 
74. 



CONSTRAINED ATTITUDES 

ited, public-opinionated, privately disinherited 
ghosts. 

To be sure, the spirit of an Ibsen play, if 
once revealed, would be very disconcerting to 
many settled minds. It should be concealed, 
for example, from the tender millionaire and 
shrinking railway president and shy upholder 
of vested Interests and all In whom the private 
moral and the public countenance are smiling 
twins, and perhaps also from the " plain peo- 
ple," for, according to our editors and pub- 
lishers, they are always very delicate, and most 
certainly from those whom the people choose, 
for any sort of new feeling might shake the 
very foundations of immediate success. But it 
is safe enough for terrible fellows like you and 
me, dear brother-scribe or fellow-failure, rav- 
ening among the flesh-pots of literary specu- 
lation, libertines of dreams, reckless of the 
modem writer at his fiercest, ready for any 
75 



CONSTRAINED ATTITUDES 

giant that may come out in the magazines, 
even though he eat us skin, bones, and moral 
sense, ready for the incendiaries of the imagi- 
nation and regretting only that in these well- 
watered literary times the fancy will not burn. 
It is not for us to complain that any drama 
on the modern stage is intellectually upsetting, 
but rather that it does not upset us so utterly 
as we could wish. 

In a book about anarchists which I read not 
long ago, the author either described or inven- 
ted two characters which had Hedda Gabler's 
same power of suggesting analogies. He said 
it was a study of the temperament of revolt, 
and an attempt to make clear the natural his- 
tory of anarchists. One of them was a girl 
of the slums, who became the mistress of a 
rhapsodical young anarchist with literary 
tastes. Her mother was half German, half 
French and often hysterical; her father was 
76 



CONSTRAINED ATTITUDES 

a German machinist and generally drunk. 
Sensuality, neurasthenia, a potential talent too 
weak to work, insatiable egotism given to what 
may be called auto-poetry or self-crooning 
(private lyrics of one's peculiar soul not nec- 
essarily musical but imagining a very musical 
applause), and above all much hit-or-miss read- 
ing of writings reputed extreme — and you 
have the heroine, or, rather, a considerable 
part of her, for she was too good a literary or 
natural product to equal any such bare list of 
qualities. One thing she certainly was not, and 
that is a mere anarchist. Her relations with 
the anarchist movement were merely incidental. 
Any excitable artistic male might have done as 
much for her soul as the anarchist dreamer 
with whom she fell in love, and "social 
rebel " is too narrow a term for such an epi- 
cure of emotion. 

For her, as for Hedda Gabler, humdrum 

n 



CONSTRAINED ATTITUDES 

was the enemy, not " society." When an- 
archism became humdrum she took to the 
woods — ^went into a camp in California, 
where the author finally leaves her, "making 
a last effort to live the straight free life of 
Nature's children, a suckling at the breasts of 
Mother Earth," and quoting from the writ- 
ings of Professor Woodside, the Nature- 
lover. A new birth, he calls it. A new appe- 
tiser, the reader says, and wonders how the 
feelings are to be scraped together next month, 
though quite sure that she will get them some- 
how. The author seemed blind to the amount 
of yeast he had put in her. He seemed not 
to know that she was blessed with enough 
power of self-dramatisation to last a life- 
time. It was absurd to assume that she would 
stay long with Professor Woodside and Na- 
ture — small blame to her, for far less restless 
souls than hers have fretted under that com- 
78 



CONSTRAINED ATTITUDES 

pulsion. It was absurd to assume that she 
would stay long- anywhere. The author tried 
to teach a lesson by her, but she became too 
real a person to stay inside his proposition. 
That is the danger to the thesis-writer of draw- 
ing a character too well; it walks off on its 
own feet, snapping its fingers at the author's 
educational intentions. 

It is proof of some power in a book if it sets 
one to speculating in this way, hunting anal- 
ogies, exceeding the author's apparent design, 
and Interviewing the characters on one's own 
account. The pleasant clever novels of the day 
leave no such illusion that the characters have 
got away, and give no such impulse to a wild- 
goose chase. It is a strange man that could 
remain awake five minutes beyond his usual 
time with any of the persons they describe. 
Gone like a glass of soda water; cheerful but 
done with; as ancient and hazy after two ticks 
79 



CONSTRAINED ATTITUDES 

of the clock as Tiglath-Pileser ; and the soul 
now ready to be completely absorbed in the 
deeds of the flies on the window pane. 

Her anarchist lover talked incessantly out 
of books with frequent allusions to seismic souls 
and Cosmos. It was the voice of literary 
youth, or of any man in a radical mood, called 
*' modem " by reviewers who pretend not to 
know that radicalism is a ratio, not a creed, 
and may have been a constant ratio, for aught 
we know, since the first rebellious anthropoph- 
agus condemned the table manners of the best 
society. He said the world to him was a " halt- 
ing hell of hitching-posts and of truculent 
troughs for belching swinehe-rds." 

He was the slave of the principle, no work 
without inspiration, and tramped and moped 
and starved rather than turn his hand 
to any task that seemed for the moment dis- 
agreeable. The disagreeableness of the task 
80 



CONSTRAINED ATTITUDES 

was proof to him that it went against the 
freedom of his nature, was a form of social 
coercion to which he is anarchist must rise su- 
perior. To work for wages was to approve 
the system of exploitation. To work for ap- 
plause was also base. One cannot be quite sure 
of one's motives. He must wait for a work 
impulse that should be self-evidently untram- 
melled and unalloyed, an autogenetic impulse, 
a sort of moral seizure; then the mind might 
work with anarchistic propriety, work because 
it really wished to, voluntarily up and dance, 
or be bowled along the line of no resistance. 
But there are often long intervals between these 
happy turns, for there is treason within us 
from the anarchistic point of view. The mind 
is already compromised; the thoughts are by 
no means free (some of them snub others) : the 
reason is often browbeaten, and sneaking little 
conventionalities start up every moment and 
81! 



CONSTRAINED ATTITUDES 

run the intellect In their own way; clearly the 
mind has been altogether overrun by " society," 
the enemy. Hence waiting around for pure 
ego-work to begin, soul cries, self-outbursts, is 
apt to run to very long pauses indeed, for the 
harder one looks inside his head the more en- 
tangled it seems with '^ society." And as the 
muscles need the pressure of objects that resist, 
a mind thus denied all exercise is apt to become 
at first flaccid and short of breath, and then, a 
mere pendulous, foolish thing awaiting justifi- 
cation by galvanism. So our anarchist ran his 
course. He was very logical. He applied the 
principles of anarchism to his own mind, and 
with entire consistency in freedom's cause he let 
it go to pieces. 

In his company the heroine plunged into in- 
discriminate reading of the brilliant writers of 
the time, some with wings, some with dubious 
flying machines of their own devising, but all 
8^ 



CONSTRAINED ATTITUDES 

essaying an upward and forward motion, skip- 
pers of tradition, and if not pioneers, at least 
fugitives from commonplace. She brought to 
them a mind without previous acquisitions and 
an experience almost exclusively physiological. 
So she became, like certain insurgent magazine 
verses, extremely vague as to the identity of 
her oppressors, sure only of her revolt. She 
quivered as she read like an unballasted re- 
viewer afloat in some tempest of " strong " 
writing, in a Jack London gale, for example, 
with the words " primal " and " elemental " 
tearing through the shrouds. " Cosmos " and 
" cosmic," as her lover used them, would at 
times delightfully capsize her. She began 
her thinking in terms of enormous girth 
and unapprehended content. Her first 
ghost stones were of "society." She had 
a woman's very personal way with large 
abstractions, making enemies or pets of 



CONSTRAINED ATTITUDES 

them, like the woman quoted by Professor 
James : " I do so love to cuddle up to 
God." She acquired that precocity of lit- 
erary feeling which prompts to " confessions " 
in advance of thinking, and you will find her 
likeness in a great deal of the premature po- 
etry of the present, written in a flutter of ex- 
pectation over an idea that does not come. 

No plodding for her. '' Small hath contin- 
ual plodding ever won, save base author- 
ity from others' books." But occasional 
plodding is necessary even for the epicure 
of emotions, to get up an appetite for 
the next sudden revelation. She read for 
the pleasure of feeling the thought jump, 
but without the acquisition of a good 
deal of dense traditional stuff there is nothing 
for the thought to jump from or over. Where 
is the fun in seeing Mr. Bernard Shaw knock 
ideas down if one has not first met them stand- 
84 



CONSTRAINED ATTITUDES 

ing up? Apart from any question of truth, 
or character, or the "meaning of life," and 
merely from the point of view of sportsman- 
ship, the mind needs its level expanses, studious 
trifles, sleepy acquisitions, dry details, tradi- 
tional irrelevanciesi, statistics, tariff^ discus- 
sions, polite conversation, leading articles and 
mild ambling poetry, including many hymns — 
in short, must plod along rather diligently at 
intervals for a due sense of the length, breadth, 
thickness and perfect humanity of platitude, 
from which alone the rocketing may be en- 
joyed. Otherwise these hop-skip- and- jump 
fellows will seem pioneers from nowhere or in- 
surgents against nothing in particular. Even 
as mere pleasure-givers they will pall, if one 
does not retain some laborious habits, remain 
something of a scholar in commonplace things. 
She wanted the emotions without gathering 
any material for them to act upon. 
85 



CONSTRAINED ATTITUDES 

She lacked, therefore, the staying power nec- 
essary even to successful hedonism, could not 
stand the training, the abstinence, the exercise. 
One sees signs of her in all classes, not merely 
in the slums and not necessarily versed in anar- 
chism. The most of her will perhaps be found 
in literary Arcadias, where, as they will tell 
you, they have " good talk." But she pricks the 
mind to seeking analogies in very respectable 
quarters, which must not be mentioned lest they 
seem far-fetched, or violate a confidence, or pro- 
voke a libel suit* 



86 



THE USUAL THING 



V 

THE USUAL THING 

I SUPPOSE I should sadly miss New York's best 
Society if it ever vanished from our books. It 
is only in American satire and fiction that I 
shall ever visit those expensive places, where, 
as a distinguished novelist has recently said,. 
" proud beauty hides its eyes on the shoulder 
of haughty commercial or financial youth while 
golden age dips its nose in whatever symbol- 
ises the Gascon wine in the paternal library." 
In Cornville, Massachusetts, where I now live, 
the people do not do such things. And I like 
to think as I shake the furnace down of nights 
how different those upper people are, and how 
remote from life's realities and coal-bins, and 

89 



CONSTRAINED ATTITUDES 

especially how shallow, up there on the silly 
surface of the earth, compared to a deep per- 
son like myself, good old truepenny, down at 
the bottom of things, tenax propositi beneath 
the cellar stairs. Probably there are not two 
fine minds in that entire class, said the distin- 
guished novelist. I like to doubt if there is 
even one good soul. Noodles and Jezebels, say 
I, the whole pack of them ; and I like to think 
that the Cornville circle in which I move is full 
of plain people but profound, hearts of oak 
with no nonsense about them, or people of 
" Culture "^ — the real thing, not from Chau- 
tauqua but from Cambridge — or people at once 
instructive and blithe, giant minds at play, gay 
astronomers, bubbling palaeontologists. And I 
like to look down from these people of my 
fancy on that other kind of people whom I do 
not know, and to hate the Persic apparatus 
and that symbolic Gascon wine, and to feel that 
90 



CONSTRAINED ATTITUDES 

I am intellectual and integer vitce and other 
things that money cannot buy. 

So I try and cherish the simple faith, built 
on the writings of some sixty years, from 
George William Curtis downwards, that New 
York Society is made up, not of people, but of 
types, each with a moral meaning no less plain 
that the personages in Pilgrim's Progress. But 
it is not easy to believe in types as compounded 
by the usual writer — phrase-haunted, fiction- 
rooted creature that he is, athirst for moral 
contrasts — and it so happens that no unusual 
writer has ever written of our best Society. 
Your true novelist does not stop with type; 
he completes an individual, having some mo- 
mentum of his own, doing or saying the unex- 
pected thing, often irrelevant; and I suppose 
if New York had had a Thackeray or Mere- 
dith her fashionable folk might have seemed 
more probable. As it is we have only Mrs. 

m 



CONSTRAINED ATTITUDES 

Potiphar, the Reverend Cream Cheese, the Set- 
tum Downes, Minerva Tattle, Timon Croesus, 
and later their derivatives with hyphenated 
names, abstractions whose daughters marry 
English lords, metaphors who run away with 
one another's wives, Van This, a virtue, and 
"Van That, a vice, and the sad tale of some fig- 
ure of speech who lost all his money and then 
shot himself. In books the authentic Vanity 
Fairs all seem to come from foreign parts. 

Exposed as I am to only potato-patch temp- 
tations I should like to realise these moral 
perils of our gilded halls, but in our native 
writings this is difficult. No story of damna- 
tion is complete without a man, and no writer 
on our best Society has created one. For the 
usual literary mind is, as is well known, lined 
with a kind of wall-paper, running a pattern 
not its own. Novelists do not invent or ob- 
serve; they rearrange their literary memories. 
92 



CONSTRAINED ATTITUDES 

Satirists borrow not only their scorn but even 
the objects of it. And surely no fashionable 
group is more subdued to precedent. They 
have their pen-fashions and their etiquette with 
goodness knows what literary gentilities, pass- 
words, cachets, literary class distinctions, hor- 
rors of the unaccustomed, rules of who's who 
and what's what and the proper thing In he- 
roes and the proper thing in thoughts. 

A hundred years of precedent will rule the 
action of a woman's face, especially the hero- 
ine's. It must be a face in which the colour 
comes and goes — run by the literary signal 
service. Shadows must flit across it, smiles 
light it, horror freeze it, blushes warm it, moral 
indignation turn it purely cold. And not once 
will that ever-busy face swerve from its prece- 
dents. The novelist will not employ the com- 
paratively uneventful human face; still less 
will he devise a face and run it arbitrarily to 
93 



CONSTRAINED ATTITUDES 

suit himself. I recall, to be sure, one charac- 
ter in fiction whose " whole face upheaved " — 
plainly an innovation — but she belonged to 
the self-willed Henry James, an anarch among 
novelists. 

And considering how writers set about their 
tasks it may be unreasonable to expect any 
sort of lifelike consequence. A novel is not a 
product of imagination. It is the electic ef- 
fort of a literary memory schooled by a social 
demand. Probably it is no more reasonable to 
look for human nature in a novel than to look 
for Nature in a woman's hat. Not, of course, 
to compare a great novel with any hat however 
admirable. That would be equally disparag- 
ing to both; one does not care to think of a 
work of genius as disappearing like a hat or of 
a hat as surviving like a work of genius ; the 
thought of an eternal hat is even hateful. But 
between the hats of the highest rank and the 
941 



CONSTRAINED ATTITUDES 

novels of the second there seems to be a sound 
analogy. 

For each being a work of customary or 
crowd-derived inspiration, their value in depict- 
ing life is much the same. One matches human 
nature as already published ; the other matches 
Nature as already worn on hats. So with a 
host of virilities and vitalities, love-storms, 
moral whirlwinds, Ruritanias, calls of the wild 
■ — you never meet the novelist who first em- 
ployed them. You see the thousand hats that 
followed the example but never the great, brave, 
strong, protagonistic and outrageous hat that 
set it. 

The call of the wild as seen on women's hats 
some seasons past proved no wild fancies in 
the heads beneath them. It was a call to prec- 
edent. When you found on a hat some singular 
bit from wildlife, say a weasel sleeping on its 
native beads or biting its light blue omelette. 



CONSTRAINED ATTITUDES 

it was not a sign of any personal wildness. It 
had occurred on many hats before. And so 
with the novels then in season. The call of 
the wild in novels at that time was not a call 
to any special wildness ; it was the peaceful 
call of one Jack London to another. The law 
of each craft is redistribution of the parts, 
and the law of each part is that it shall have 
appeared successfully in public not very long 
before. 

And since obedience to these laws is usually 
unconscious, I have heard it said that the joy 
of the work is often not to be told apart from 
the joy of first creation. Here indeed the hat 
has somewhat the advantage, for women do 
sometimes more utterly let themselves go, feel 
more of that first, fine careless rapture, in a 
hat than the novelist does in his novel. And 
as to the rule that, The style is the man, though 
I am not versed in the equations of self-ex- 
96 



CONSTRAINED ATTITUDES 

pression, I believe it could be easily proved that 
the hat is more exactly the woman. A novel 
always seems a form of self-concealment. Yet 
a woman otherwise quite subdued may suddenly 
appear in a hat that is all ablaze with feel- 
ing — no doubt imprisoned passion's single mad 
escape — and you sometimes meet a hot, infuri- 
ate hat, hardly venturing to look at the rabid 
face beneath, yet find there a countenance of 
great serenity. The riot of emotion had passed 
off in the hat, leaving the soul at peace. This 
is not true of novelists, who, on the contrary, 
seen in the flesh, show personal diversities in 
hue, texture, patterns, general design, degree 
of animation, not to be guessed from any of 
their books. 

And considering, by the way, the firm com- 
mercial basis on which our books like our mil- 
linery so often rest, I wonder why writers are 
generally supposed to have no aptitude for 

97 



CONSTRAINED ATTITUDES 

practical affairs. I never could understand 
those protracted discussions which arise when- 
ever a romantic novelist takes it very naturally 
into his head that he would make a good 
mayor of Jonesville. It is the practice on these 
occasions to treat the political aspirations of 
the American literary man in a scornful man- 
ner, to recall the fate of his predecessors and to 
exhibit the supposed incongruity between our 
belles lettres and our practical politics. So 
far from taking it as a matter of course that 
our popular novelists should fail in politics, 
I find It a subject not only for regret but for 
astonishment. They are a hardy, sagacious, 
business-like breed. They are predominantly 
civic and practical. They have as keen an in- 
stinct for what people want as brewers, hat- 
makers, or grocers, and they are aiming, un- 
consciously perhaps, at results as immediate 
and tangible. In no other country is there so 
98 



CONSTRAINED ATTITUDES 

slight a difference between the qualities of the 
popular novelist and those of the successful 
man of business. The successful romantic novel 
of to-day is of pure business all compact. Too 
little is said of the mercantile shrewdness that 
goes to the making of such novels and the 
publishing of them in the nick of time. Leav- 
ing aside any literary criterion, I hold that 
as high commercial qualities distinguish the 
authors as adorn any Senator in Washing- 
ton. 

And in denying literary qualities to the 
evanescent novelists of yesterday or to-day, we 
do but smooth away certain obstacles in their 
political career. It is well known that among 
men at large the word literary has a formid- 
able and exclusive sound. Even the word book 
will frighten voters. We should devise an- 
other way of speaking of these things. When 
a popular writer runs for office, he should be 
99 



CONSTRAINED ATTITUDES 

referred to as a manufacturer of bibloids. Let 
it be once known how unliterary most writers 
really are, and there will be more of them in 
the Board of Aldermen. Of the novelists in 
this country to-day there are but two men 
whose talents are so essentially literary as to 
unfit them for political office. It is of course 
impossible to imagine a more unloved Assembly- 
man than Mr. Howells or a more scandalous 
State Senator than Mr. Henry James. In 
their books they have disregarded a popular 
mandate on every page. But our other writ- 
ers are guilty of no such divergence. Who 
could find any Pierian austerity abbut 
them? Current literature is not a jealous 
god; nor does it breed unthrifty habits, 
or a visionary turn of mind, or levity, 
or a too personal view, or any other spir- 
itual twist that should disable a man's 
politics. On the contrary, success in it often 
100 



CONSTRAINED ATTITUDES 

proves a man possessed of the politician's 
greatest gift, the Instinct for majorities. 

Obvious as these analogies appear they 
escape our critics every day. Literary criti- 
cism mainly consists in judging each ordinary 
man by the rules of a different game from the 
one he is playing. Hence the servilities and 
hauteurs of those strange propounders of un- 
natural certitude, the literary periodicals, their 
hot and cold fits, false starts and stampedes; 
praise for the plodding author as if he were an 
artist, curses for him merely because he is not. 
A critic is commonly a person who reads with 
an unusual show of feeling some very usual 
book, then tries to turn the writer's head com- 
pletely or else to take it off. 

I read last week in the London Bomhardinian 

that Robinson and Aristophanes are very near 

of kin. To-day I learn from the Weekly Icha- 

bod that Robinson in contrast to past glories 

101 



CONSTRAINED ATTITUDES 

is the vanishing-point of the human mind. 
Yet Robinson could not have caused these per- 
sons this excitement. For Robinson is com- 
pounded of the very tissues of routine, and of 
like substance with many Browns and Joneses, 
and the mind that could not survey Robinson 
with composure would be shattered in a single 
day's experience. It arose, of course, from 
false analogies. One dragged in masterpieces 
merely to light up Robinson; the other to cast 
him in the shade. On reading Robinson they 
allowed themselves to think of literature, so hor- 
rid comparisons shot into their heads ; whereas 
had they been thinking of more usual things, 
of hats, cigars, newspapers or their daily meals, 
they might have shown him in his true relations. 
And since with a few exceptions here and 
there, the siftings of some centuries, writers 
do not report credibly of one another, or of 
any man, or of what they see or what they feel, 
103 



CONSTRAINED ATTITUDES 

but are men of a borrowed gesture, custom- 
pushed, too close to the world to give an ac- 
count of it, it is rash to judge any city or class 
or group, or hang any dog on their evidence. 
That second simplicity which our best Society 
has not attained is certainly not to be found 
in the books about it. And in this good-na- 
tured land of easy prizes and quick forgetful- 
ness with so much room for mediocrity at the 
top, climbing the Society ladder does not con- 
strain to any more uneasiness of pose than 
climbing the literary one. They are not a 
care-free people, those " Cultured " few. Lit- 
tle of devil-may-care aristocracy about them; 
on the contrary rather a painful consciousness 
of status, it would seem, with need of very fre- 
quent explanations, mention of acquaintances 
among the proper set of books, display of cre- 
dentials, proofs of au-fait-ness, proofs of com- 
me-il-faut-ness, rebukes of the vulgar, snubs 
103 



CONSTRAINED ATTITUDES 

for the illiterate, drawings of " the line," in 
short all the fidgets of the higher plane. The 
most respectably furnished intellects of our 
time often seem no more at home than Mr. Pot- 
iphar with his onnolu and black walnut. Nor 
was Mrs. Potlphar's grave concern for Lon- 
don liveries and footmen's calves more typical 
of fashionable Society In that day than of the 
prolonged colonialism of American letters, both 
in that day and in this, and Including the Pott- 
phar Papers, Our books, like the lives of our 
millionaires, show minds prostrated by their ac- 
quisitions. 

Hence on reaamg some bitter little book 
about our best Society, I cannot feel as supe- 
rior as I could wish, but must needs be thinking 
that it applies as well to a good many other 
grades and groups, composed of the ordinary 
time-serving sort of men, and perhaps to the 
author and perhaps to Comville and to me. 
104* 



CONSTRAINED ATTITUDES 

And I wonder if he could have written so cynic- 
ally of those fashionable goings-on, had he at- 
tended that last meeting of the Cornville School 
Board, for though it is not wealth or idleness 
that has spoiled us, it might have shocked 
him all the more to see how spoiled we are. 
Those who satirise some single group of us 
seem strangely merciful to all the rest. Those 
bitter persons do not know that their quarrel 
is with commonplace or realise how long that 
quarrel is. 

I fancy if by some strange chance a wise 
man were to find himself amongst us nothing 
would surprise him more than this contempt 
of us quite ordinary folk for one another, class 
for class and group for group, the man of 
books for the man of dollars, each strutting 
among his misused opportunities, the humdrum 
critic for the humdrum author, mechanical 
poets for mechanical engineers, and the rank 
105 



CONSTRAINED ATTITUDES 

and file of stage reformers for the rank and 
file of plays. For he would see us for the men 
we are, the sort that perish utterly and leave 
not a trace, and would marvel greatly at our 
imaginary inequalities. And I fancy he would 
drive us almost mad by prying into these dis- 
tinctions and by his superstitious talk, appeal- 
ing to some demon or some god as the source 
of real distinctions, and to the need of some 
moonshiny inspiration, without which we were 
merely usual persons higgling with one an- 
other about the usual thing, trying to found 
little aristocracies of taste on grounds of com- 
mon failure, spiritlessly pretending polite con- 
cern in spiritual affairs. And by the time 
this peering and Socratic person had re- 
duced us all to lowest terms, wonderfully equal 
in absurdity, and wrecked our intellectual hier- 
archy, and shown that there could not be any 
great diversity of rank in our pantisocracy of 
106 



CONSTRAINED ATTITUDES 

middling intellects, we should be thankful 
enough to the eleven judges who hurried him 
off to his hemlock. A fitting end to his war 
with commonplace, and served him right, for 
he knew that it led to the kind of philosophy 
which has been rightly called the " practice of 
death," and that if he would only keep the 
peace, he too, like us, might be " eating and 
drinking in Thessaly." 

Yet our scorn of common things does seem 
rather absurd when we ourselves are in no wise 
remarkable. And so do our attempts to frame 
rules in advance for artistic greatness or to 
account for its long delays. One of the first 
things a critic learns from the manuals of 
American literature, is to explain the sleepy 
state of our drama and letters by their youth. 
Such a young country, and with manners so 
unformed, such vulgar, rich people, such un- 
stable lower classes, how can you expect a work 
lOT 



CONSTRAINED ATTITUDES 

of art? We have dull books because life is 
empty, and if now and then a fairly good one 
appears, it is thrown away on so crude a sub- 
ject. Wait till we cease to be common, till 
we get a " background " with some ivy grow- 
ing on it, till the rich are picturesque, and soci- 
ety is stratified and the poor are in costume 
and know their place — then it may be worth 
while for a genius to begin. 

Here we are, some of us totally bald and 
some with long white beards, yet all of us far 
too young to deserve either drama or fiction. 
There seems to be a breed of critics who be- 
lieve in the utter vulgarity of here and now, 
and refer every artistic failure to time, place, 
subject, social conditions, to anything under 
the sun but the quality of the writer's mind. 
Books on American literature are full of these 
elaborate apologies, and you might think that 
the brain of an author was some superior kind 
108 



CONSTRAINED ATTITUDES 

of squash or melon that could seldom be raised 
here for lack of the proper fertiHser. Still 
more depressing is the view that a writer's fail- 
ure is due to the material, that any sort of 
human beings, fashionable or unfashionable, 
finished or unfinished, are to blame for the writ- 
er's lack of interest or unworthy of " subtle 
method and refined analysis " or any other good 
thing he or she may happen to have. Why 
try and explain our " flat unraised spirits " by 
the ingrained commonness of things or cheat 
the uninspired with the hope that had they a 
higher subject they might soar? New York 
is not to blame for the quality of the books 
about her. You might as well blame Jerusa- 
lem for Ben Hur, 

And even more absurd, I think, are our crit- 
ical petulance and shabby excuses on the sub- 
ject of the stage. Surely we might have spared 
ourselves our solemn trifling about the Amer- 
109 



CONSTRAINED ATTITUDES 

ican drama these past ten years, discussing 
an art before the art emerges, bombinating in 
a vacuum, drawing disproportionate moral les- 
sons from little foolish things. That is the 
bad result of applying artistic and intellectual 
standards to such matters merely to show that 
you have them about you. Later a sense of 
their irrelevancy comes upon you. They might 
as well have been applied to ten years of news- 
paper-reading, ten years of table-talk. 

Compunctions for your own pomposity tor- 
ment you in the intervals of self-approval. One 
of the cheats of the critical temperament is the 
belief that when its possessor is bored there is 
always some external reason to account for 
it. The critical person seldom admits that his 
ennui may be merely his own mind's little do- 
mestic tragedy. He reasons rather that it is 
a social disaster, sometimes of national di- 
mensions, and the more he reflects, the more he 
110 



CONSTRAINED ATTITUDES 

bolls with public spirit, contrasting the pres- 
ent with the past and forgetting that the past 
is a place where the little foolish things are all 
forgotten. 

If we had to be persistently Intellectual and 
analyse all the jokes into their constituents ; if 
the lines seemed like an almanac and the lead- 
ing lady a little vulgar despite her good looks, 
and the laughter Irritated because we could not 
share It, whose fault was It? Was It so very 
different from the street or from any of those 
large Intellectually empty chatterlng-places 
wherein men meet for purposes merely gre- 
garious? There at least remained that glor- 
ious sense of superiority. How delightfully 
few of us there were and how many of them ! 
Contrast the wit of Our Flat with the wit of 
Hudibras, let the keen mind detect the lack of 
logic In the plot, compare Charles Lamb with 
Mr. Eddie Smith, and be cheerful In a splendid 
111 



CONSTRAINED ATTITUDES 

isolation. There was no need of being crabbed 
about it. One could scarcely remain a patriot 
if lie hated all fools. 

After allj the lucky man of the present is 
he who can remain cheerful in the presence of 
the usual thing, when its only vice is its usual- 
ness. Reform often seems only the dislike of 
the blase for the people with animal spirits. 
The oratory of ennui serves no purpose what- 
ever. Ennui is a matter of reduced vitality or 
of spiritual defeat. It is a large, vulgar, gar- 
rulous and repetitious planet, and the play is 
only one of many human noises, not a picture 
of life, but an extension of it after all, and 
though our playwrights are .not interesting as 
artists, they are at least objects of a reason- 
able curiosity as meteorologists of the public 
whims. I wonder if our warfare with these 
small matters will hasten much the coming of 
great things. 

113 



CONSTRAINED ATTITUDES 

Yet I remember once seeing five musical 
comedies in a single week, always with my 
country's good in mind. It arose from a mis- 
understanding with a magazine. For some 
months past the London critics had been la- 
menting the overthrow of British drama by 
music, horseplay and the dance, and the ques- 
tion arose whether America was in like peril. 
So a magazine editor sent me forth to see, hav- 
ing mistaken me for a dramatic critic. I was 
expected to find something to say that would 
instruct the public, promote the general wel- 
fare, and tend to the improvement of the Amer- 
ican stage. Wrapped in this earnest purpose 
I sat for five successive summer evenings 
through five musical comedies that were in all 
essentials just alike, and I did what the real 
dramatic critic usually does in like circum- 
stances. I wrote as one who had " the wel- 
fare of the stage at heart." I complained that 
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CONSTRAINED ATTITUDES 

new musical comedies were not really new. I 
compared them with works of art and not with 
the products of industry. I had much to say 
about lack of originality. 

Yet I knew that like other large in- 
dustries the making of musical comedies 
proceeded on the principle of interchange- 
able parts. There was no need of a new mu- 
sical comedy. An old one refitted with stand- 
ard parts was equally serviceable. In fact, 
it is the purpose of a musical comedy only to 
seem new without being so — a sound business 
principle, as may be proved at any time by a 
study of soaps or tinned goods. As a biscuit 
promoter, for instance, you- would not aim at 
any large originality in design or novelty in 
flavour. An astonishing biscuit would not 
serve your turn. You would study the most 
successful biscuits that you knew and depart 
from them in no essential. You would con- 



CONSTRAINED ATTITUDES 

ceive jour biscuit with a chastened fancy, view- 
ing it as the pale flower of a public want, not 
as your private dream of beauly. taking the 
biscuit-eater as he is, not as he might be, and 
framing it on past biscuits tried and proved 
and still selling. As a biscuit-maker you would 
be self-subdued and un-Shakesperean, and your 
Butterettes would depart as little as possible 
from the highly prosperous Crispines, their 
predecessor. Your pent-up fancy would only 
emerge when it came to advertising. 

The question we ask of the stage is only 
the question that we ask through life in this 
great iterative democracy, of books, of news- 
papers and of men — ^Why the same thing so 
often ? 

On returning to New York I have found in 

this artistic and literary sameness a sense of 

permanence that after a few months' absence 

I always miss in the streets. There at least I 

115 



CONSTRAINED ATTITUDES 

find assurance that I shall not fall behind the 
times. After all, the minds of playwrights 
and of authors are among the few remaining 
landmarks on which New York may surely 
count. It is hard enough in this city to pre- 
serve associations with any material thing. No 
indigenous New Yorker can revisit anything. 
No spirit of place for him. He cannot retrace 
the series of his homes. They have decayed 
into grocer's shops or shot up into apartment 
houses. His sky-line loses its teeth even as he 
looks at it, and In a few months from their sock- 
ets enormous fangs protrude. His university 
has zigzagged uptown, coquetting in the side 
streets, and Is now perhaps for a moment paus- 
ing somewhere In the Harlem hills. Or maybe 
it is perching casually on the top of some tall 
building with a Latin sign — perstando et prce- 
stando utilitati, which in the circumstances 
sounds ironical. His club has dodged him five 
116 



CONSTRAINED ATTITUDES 

times and swollen beyond all recogniton and 
lined its fat belly with marbles and rich mem- 
bers and mural decorations, at which he looks 
very hard and earnestly, hoping perhaps to 
fix them in his memory before the house comes 
down. But it is foolish to look hard at any- 
thing. It will only trouble him a little later 
when he tries to remember where he saw it. 
There is really no use in burdening his memory 
with anything, except perhaps two rivers and 
a sky. If his income increases and he wishes 
to be fashionable, he moves northeast. If his 
income increases and he does not wish to be 
fashionable, he moves northwest. If his in- 
come remains the same, he moves from the 
Plantagenet on this side of the Elevated Rail- 
way — ^which has raised the rent — to the Anda- 
lusia on the other side — ^which soon will raise 
it; then it is ho! for the Cinderella near the 
water's edge. If his income decreases — ^but 
117 



CONSTRAINED ATTITUDES 

there is no use in mentioning that, for to that 
extent he ceases to be a New Yorker; ceases, 
indeed, to be anything, fades, loses all meaning 
— gets himself perhaps a little ghosthood in 
the suburbs, but henceforth is never really any- 
where, only on his way to it, a lost spirit of 
detachment, mere phantom of the to and fro. 
In any case he moves and in any case he can- 
not find the place he moved from. 

But he will find the native drama precisely 
as he left it. There is always the new American 
play. Man and boy he has known it. It is 
one of his few old oaken buckets and ivy-cov- 
ered things. Here twenty years are as one day 
and his neighbours are assuring him that no- 
body has grown any older. Why go back to 
the old farm and the dried apples and the trusty 
corn-popper? Associations with the play are 
even earlier — full indeed of a quite incalculable 
earliness. New York's tastes are her family 
antiquities and her familiar things are her new 
118 



CONSTRAINED ATTITUDES 

successes. She has no dear old woodshed and 
her hearths are like the nests of sparrows on 
a derrick, but she has new poems, as good as 
andirons, and new novels, such as one's mother 
used to read, and there is always a rising journ- 
alist, a rising dramatist, painted on the same 
quarter of the sky. There are few spots in her 
plays or her letters where one is not at home, 
almost too domestically. Hence to allay any 
perturbation on finding, say, after six months' 
absence. Fifth Avenue turned into a tunnel and 
my friends all gone beyond the Bronx, I have 
merely to see the play or read the novel. There 
is the genius loci in all its golden immaturity. 
After all, it is only physically and financially 
that New Yorkers buzz along. Our wits are 
at the old homestead. Therefore, when the 
critics fume as they do about our intellectual 
condition, let them at least for charity's sake 
remember that it is about the only thing to 
which New Yorkers may come home again, 
119 



IMPATIENT "CULTURE" AND 
THE LITERAL MIND 



VI 

IMiPATIENT "CULTURE" AND 
THE LITERAL MIND 

I HAVE been reading a gloomy article in the 
Didactic Monthly by a professor of the social 
sciences who Is sorry he studied Greek. He 
loves it, he says, but doubts its " cultural 
value " or effectiveness in the " battle of life." 

"Would I trade my Greek," he exclaims, "considered 
both culturally and practically, for biology, for zoology, 
or for geology, let alone a combination (which would be 
a fairer equivalent) of these or similar other studies? A 
positive affirmative leaps to the lips." 

He finds that his teacher fooled him about 

the classics, for looking back from his middle 

age he perceives that Cicero was conceited and 

Thucydides left clauses hanging in the air in 

123 



CONSTRAINED ATTITUDES 

a way that no magazine editor would now tol- 
erate. The teacher never told him this, but 
now as a " reflective graduate he sees it and 
feels that he has been duped." 

Of course, Greek should be better taught. 
Excellent Greek scholars, like eminent econo- 
mists and sociologists, often seem strangely ill- 
nourished by what they feed on. That, indeed, 
is a frequent accident in the teaching profes- 
sion — the teacher himself will often seem much 
damaged by his subject, no matter what the 
subject is. Educational writers are always 
blaming subjects instead of men, looking for 
some galvanic theme or method which when ap- 
plied by a man without any gift for teaching 
to a mind without any capacity for learning 
will somehow produce intellectual results. It 
is a purely personal question and has nothing 
to do with Greek. It is odd that anyone should 
believe at this late date that any conceivable 
U4^ 



CONSTRAINED ATTITUDES 

combination of geology, zoology, biology will 
save a man from these disasters. They hap- 
pen daily at all points of the educational com- 
pass, in subjects the most modem and " cul- 
turally " vivacious, genuine " battle-of-life " 
subjects — pedagogy, potato philosophies, 
courses in sanitary plumbing, slum seminars in 
sociology. 

" Gentlemen," says a voice from the past, 
" to give the full force of the Greek particles, 
which are really very important — very impor- 
tant, the passage should be rendered thus : ' Im- 
mediately as the troops advanced, the sun also 
was setting.' " It happens to come from the 
Greek class-room, but there are echoes from 
the other class-rooms quite as absurd, and, now 
that I think of it, this dried-up and belated 
old Grecian, long since dead, this eager and 
enthusiastic old gentleman whose spectacles 
leaped from his nose whenever he smelled a sec- 
125 



CONSTRAINED ATTITUDES 

ond aorist, was somehow more humane and less 
dispiriting, had made his learning more his 
own, liked it better, had better manners in im- 
parting it, than the most modem and practical 
and pedagogicallj indisputable of them all. 
Greek did not give him these qualities ; nor 
could the social sciences have taken them away. 
It merely happened that he was the kind of 
man in whom dead thoughts, whether in a Greek 
grammar or a government report, seem to come 
to life again; whereas there is no subject how- 
ever " vital " that another sort of person can- 
not easily put it to death. Was there ever a 
"burning" question that could not be immedi- 
ately extinguished by almost any one at an 
alumni dinner or in a magazine? 

To be sure the present state of my wits is 
far from satisfactory and there may have been 
some magical combination, say, of botany, me- 
chanical drawing, and palaeontology, some 
grouping of studies, so divinely planned, so 
126 



CONSTRAINED ATTITUDES 

" culturally " potent, that taken instead of 
Greek would have raised in me an intellect of 
unusual size and agility, a comfort to myself, 
an object of astonishment to visitors, but then 
again, who knows? Perhaps there was no 
charm in any part of the curriculum that could 
have wrought it; perhaps nature had some- 
thing to say about it. In any event, is it right 
that a man on considering his head in the forties 
should blame Greek and an old gentleman 
twenty years ago for the state of it — write to 
the Didactic Monthly about it, complain that 
it would have been a better head if other people 
had not put the wrong things in it or packed 
it so carelessly that some of the things slipped 
out, or that it went by mistake to a Greek pro- 
fessor when it should have gone to some geol- 
ogist? Maybe the face of Heaven was set 
against that head from the start. Certainly 
it makes a difference to whom it belongs. 

It is one of the pleasures of growing old 
127 



CONSTRAINED ATTITUDES 

and getting farther away from educators that 
we care more for the kind of head and less for 
the kind of facts that rain upon it, distrust 
all pedantic educational higgling over the " cul- 
tural" value of this or that, doubt the divine 
efficacy of any subject as a cure for the per- 
sonal vacuities, doubt, when learned Greek meets 
scientific Trojan, which of the twain would be 
the worse to live with. And if a man has to 
go to middle age to find out that Cicero was 
somewhat conceited, Isocrates a trifle pompous, 
Quintilian rather inclined to platitude, it may 
have been merely a private aff*air, a secret be- 
tween him and nature, involving no teacher or 
system whatever. For certain incipient activi- 
ties may be expected even of the young. Was 
the young man waiting for artificial respira- 
tion .^^ If Xenophon was merely a noun of the 
third declension who remarked to some people 
in the dative plural that either thalassa or 
128 



CONSTRAINED ATTITUDES 

thalatta was correct, if Tacitus was only a 
careless Roman who often dropped his verbs, 
obliging some anxious commentator to pick 
them up in footnotes uttering the startled cry 
of scilicet — even a change of subject might 
have done no good, for the young mind ap- 
parently had not yet emerged. 

However, the literal-minded are they that In- 
herit the earth, and if Greek literature or any 
other literature had really waked up this man's 
fancy, there Is no knowing into what unsocial, 
unprofitable dream-comer he might have 
drifted, while progress buzzed past and prob- 
lems whistled over him and education went fiz- 
zling by. He might have been a nympholept, 
for aught he knows, instead of a useful college 
professor, and spent days In mooning when he 
should have been up and doing, getting on in 
the world, educating, leading people from some 
place to some other place, no matter whence, 
129 



CONSTRAINED ATTITUDES 

no matter whither, but leading them. For it 
is a forlorn and pitiable thing in a democracy 
to go anywhere without taking other people — 
even through a book. Of what use is a citizen 
whose pleasures are private? We may thank 
our stars that we are bom without imagina- 
tion in these days or if we start with a little of 
it can easily kill it after childhood. It would 
be, I think, an isolating faculty in this democ- 
racy, unsocial, perhaps unpatriotic, a traitor 
to the sovereignty of the present moment, blind 
at a bargain, useless in reform, a heretic of 
social values, a sceptic of the scale of immedi- 
ate importance. 

An imaginative man might never read a news- 
paper. He could so easily invent more excit- 
ing news and more amusing editors. Imagin- 
ing success, he might not want it. Imagining 
people, he might not care to meet them. Why 
should an imaginative man read a president's 
ISO 



CONSTRAINED ATTITUDES 

message or an opposition editor's remarks 
thereon, or hear the talk of a club member 
about either? Would not these novel and valu- 
able forms of entertainment be staled in ad- 
vance to that accursed and proleptic dreamer? 
He might soon be prefiguring next week's gos- 
sip and not reading it, guessing at his com- 
patriots instead of taking them by the hand, 
guessing himself so vividly in and out of pub- 
lice places that he would not wish to go. Many 
affairs of vast present importance would not 
be nearly so entrancing as a good quiet guess 
about them to an imaginative man. This is 
not the time and place for any praise of imag- 
inative pleasures. They unfit a man for the 
travelled routes and main chances of this democ- 
racy. They encourage personal divergencies. 
They lead to conduct unbecoming in a social 
unit. They are neither civic nor aggregative, 
but spht a man from his race, mass, class or 
131 



CONSTRAINED ATTITUDES 

group, by giving him secret diversions and ab- 
sent-minded activities for which not a penny 
will be paid. They spoil him for an active part 
in any branch of that great society for the pro- 
motion of human homogeneity which under one 
name or another has been doing great work 
these many years in all parts of the country 
toward the obliteration of personal distinctions. 
Hence it is better to read books as unimag- 
inatively and impersonally as possible, think- 
ing only of " results," of what may be turned 
to account, easily communicated, reduced to 
summaries, talked about, lectured on. Never 
a private taste without some form of public 
demonstration, if you wish -to " get on in the 
world." And that is the safest way to write 
books, also, for an imaginative book is bound 
to seem a queer one. Readers desire that to 
which they are accustomed. They are accus- 
tomed to memory in a novelist, also to great 
13^ 



CONSTRAINED ATTITUDES 

mimetic skill and industry, but they are not 
accustomed to imagination. Accordingly they 
flee in large numbers from such a book, asking 
what it is " all about." That is one of the 
strange things about the literal mind. Why 
does it ask this question of books alone? It 
does not in the least know what the world is 
" driving at," but does not on that account run 
away from the world. It marries, eats, is fond 
of its children, votes, goes to church, reads 
the newspapers, slaughters wild fowl, catches 
needless fish, talks endlessly, plays complicated 
and unnecessary games, propels unpleasant- 
smelling engines at enormous speed along the 
road — all without looking for a reason or being 
able to find one if it did. It is at any moment 
of the day an automaton of custom, irrational, 
antecedently improbable, no more able to give 
an account of itself than a bit of paper swim- 
ming in the wind — but put a fantastic book 
133 



CONSTRAINED ATTITUDES 

before it and off goes the creature indignantly 
grumbling about the lack of an explanation. 
As if the wildest thing ever written were half 
so queer, inscrutable, fantastic or a priori in- 
credible as the commonest man that ever ran 
away from it. 

We see more nowadays of this queer rage 
that follows literary incomprehension because 
there are so many more people who are trying 
to read and write. When an amusing and 
fantastic little narrative was printed in Eng- 
land some years ago, I recall many stout Brit- 
ishers who stamped on it with their hob-nailed 
shoes, merely because it contained no large 
round meanings like the London Times or Mr. 
Crockett. There is in these matters a sort of 
loquacity of negation as if every one who could 
not feel were bound to be a propagandist of 
apathy. The literary commentator seems 
strangely jealous of the things undreamt of 
134i 



CONSTRAINED ATTITUDES 

in his philosophy. He is eager to vindicate 
his vacuum and the sequel to his " I don't feel 
it " is " Neither do you," usually with a show 
of ill-temper. 

The theory of it is that all heads are of the 
same thickness and that the man who finds any 
meaning where you do not is probably an im- 
postor. The excuse for it is the frequency of 
fraud, especially in literary cults. Cults as a 
rule are as soulless as corporations. One feels, 
for instance, toward certain uncritical lovers 
of Mr. Henry James as Emerson did toward 
noisy nature-lovers. "When a man tells you 
he has the love of nature in his heart," said 
he, "you may be sure he hasn't any." No 
one should be blamed for being suspicious of 
the literary cult. And it is as short-lived as 
it is deceitful; for it has been observed of 
its members, as of the blue-bottle fly, that 
they buzz the loudest just before they 
135 



CONSTRAINED ATTITUDES 

drop. Excesses of this sort have of late 
years been invariably followed by periods 
of severe repression — of silence almost pro- 
portionate to the degree of garrulity when 
the talking fit was on. The hush that 
settled upon Trilby and Robert Elsmere 
endures to this day. The reader of The Man 
with the Hoe, if there be one, is as the owl in 
the desert; and upon the lips of the Omarian 
the spider builds its web. Men still find pleas- 
ure in the writings of Stevenson, but where 
are the Stevensonians ? Where are the Smith- 
ites, Brownists and Robinsonians of yester- 
year.'* Let a subject once fall to the cult, let 
the lavish tongues of small expounders have 
their way, and the waters soon close over it. 

But apart from this well-founded suspicion 

of the cult, there is no doubt that contact with 

the things that they do not understand is to 

many minds acutely disagreeable. All the 

136 



CONSTRAINED ATTITUDES 

greater dramas contain highly valued passages 
which are not only wearisome to many in the 
audience but actually offensive to them. A 
dog not only prefers a customary and un- 
pleasant smell; he hates a good one. A per- 
fume pricks his nose, — gives a wrench to his 
dog nature, perhaps tends to " undermine 
those moral principles " without which dog 
" society cannot exist," as the early critics used 
to say of Ibsen. Hatred of the unfamiliar is 
surely as common a rule as Omne ignotum pro 
magnifico. 

But the great triumphs of the literal mind 
occur in the field of literary criticism;, as when 
experts take the measure of the poets or tab- 
ulate their parts of speech. Consider, for 
example, the polemics of literary measurement 
to be found in almost any literary magazine. 
I never know which side to take in these dis- 
cussions as to what constitutes true poetry or 
13^ 



CONSTRAINED ATTITUDES 

as to the relative measurements of bards. This 
is due, I fear, to gross inaccuracy. Parnassus 
has never been for me ringed with lines show- 
ing altitude above prose-level, like the moun- 
tains in the school geographies, nor have 
I been able to grade geniuses as accu- 
rately as I could wish. Ranging one bard 
along with another, old or new, great or 
small, I am apt to miscalculate by many 
centimetres. I am not even sure of my- 
self in applying the Johnsonian parallel to 
present poets of a certain degree. I might 
say, for example, that, if of Bilder's Muse the 
steam pressure is higher, that of Barman is 
broader in the beam — but I should do so with 
little confidence that it would survive the tests 
of later investigators. 

Hence my pleasure (a little mixed with 
envy) in many magazine discussions grad- 
ing authors, according to sweetness, girth, 
138 



CONSTRAINED ATTITUDES 

weight, height, depth, speed and durability, 
with never a moment's doubt. Perhaps a 
compatriot of Emerson declares he is en- 
titled to the first rank anywhere, and from 
this position shall never be dislodged, and a 
London reviewer says he cannot allow it be- 
cause Emerson was lacking in Je-ne-sais-quoi- 
ness, and lived too long at Concord, Massachu- 
setts, and much as he hates to disquiet Amer- 
ica, he must rate Emerson two points lower. 
Or it may be that a visiting American Pro- 
fessor in the course of his Cambridge lectures 
does not rate the versatility of Dryden so high 
as it is rated by some Oxford don, who has 
scheduled the qualities of all the poets and 
marked them on the scale of ten, and the don 
turns quickly to his tables and finds that many 
of the Professor's tastes are inexcusably er- 
roneous, wrong by Troy weight, wrong by 
avoirdupois, and that they are not always ex- 
139 



CONSTRAINED ATTITUDES 

pressed in donnish language, several phrases 
being merely suggestive and three prepositions 
misplaced. So on this firm basis he proves the 
lecturer illiterate and shallow-pated, and then 
with wider sweep (for he happens to be writ- 
ing in the London Bombardinian, whose policy 
it is to insult America as no grand division of 
the earth's surface has ever been insulted be- 
fore) he dismisses all American scholarship as 
quite worthless and American. 

Or, again, it may be that Mr. Barker 
(one of those rare expository poets, who 
after the printing* of a poem can live 
handsomely for several years on the in- 
come of their explanations), appears once 
more in a magazine, and the question immedi- 
ately arises. Is it a deathless song? And one 
maintains that Mr. Barker is the true bobo- 
link singing with his breast against a thorn, 
and another disproves it by citing two or three 
140 



CONSTRAINED ATTITUDES 

mixed metaphors or lines that he cannot under- 
stand. 

"The great white peak of my soul has spoken" 
"To the depths of my being below." 

"How can a peak speak.'*" says the foe of 
Barker, but a man from the poets' ranks fells 
him with the Bible. '' Why hop ye so, ye high 
hills ? " says the Bible, and how can a " high 
hill hop.?" And on they go, each deciding 
the thing absolutely and trying to bind the 
rest, and Mr. Barker waits cheerfully, know- 
ing that his time will surely come, and mean- 
while plans lecture tours along all the prin- 
cipal trade routes of the country. I may not 
address myself to these grave issues in the 
clarion tones that they deserve, but I appre- 
ciate the spirit of such discussions and like to 
see them going on. 

Or suppose the great question of " English 
141 



CONSTRAINED ATTITUDES 

style " reappears in the magazines. A sentinel 
of " Culture " has been found asleep ; a pro- 
fessor of English literature in a book on rhet- 
oric for the young has himself been quite in- 
elegant. Thrice has he ended a sentence with 
the careless words " and so on," and on one 
page he has referred coarsely to " the business 
in hand" and on another he has said he 
"pitched upon a word," — as if a gentleman 
would ever pitch on anything; it is the act of 
a drunkard or a ship. And thereupon some 
one all aglow with true refinement asks what 
our native language will become if men in such 
high station fall into blunders gross as these. 
And the blunders are then pilloried in italics or 
marched to jail behind exclamation points, 
looking very guilty indeed, and the newspapers 
copy, and editorial writers, straining to sud- 
den dignity of phrase, comment on it with a 
splendid scorn. Finally, if the weather is 
in 



CONSTRAINED ATTITUDES 

warm, " Typicus " and " Phllologus " write let- 
ters ending either with " Quis custodes custo- 
diet " or with " Verbum sat,'* and others fol- 
low, and all concerned are soon debating 
whether you can be a perfect gentleman and 
end a sentence with a prepositon. It is a scene 
of great and cheerful activity, and no man with 
his heart in the right place will begrudge the 
participants any of their joy. 

Yet it puzzles us simpler folk, who did 
not know that even the best of grammar 
could really save an " English style." 
For it is astonishing how vicious an "Eng- 
lish style" may be without getting into 
the grammatical police court. And the 
man who writes about it at the great- 
est length on this occasion seems not to have 
attained it though he breaks no laws. The 
sentences are willing to parse for him, but that 
is all. They deny all complicity with his mind> 
143 



CONSTRAINED ATTITUDES 

all ease, intimacy and sense of form; call up 
no image and suggest no thought ; do nothing, 
in short? that might distinguish him from the 
Comptroller of the Mint, the Board of Educa- 
tion, a Consular Report, or the Turveydrop 
on the morning newspaper who took his treatise 
as a text for a lecture on literary deportment. 
Of course this is no fault of his, but in the ca- 
pricious region of " English style " the person- 
ally blameless seem often to be the deepest 
damned. We forgive some men sooner for 
breaking the law than others for breaking the 
silence; and there is something about these 
staunch upholders of the law that drives all 
uncouth persons, like myself, to mad excesses. 
We rush into some lonely shed and split in- 
finitives. 

And of what use is it to attack one Dr. Dry- 
bosh, as a daily paper did, because he wrote 
six hundred pages on Tennyson's diction and 
144$ 



CONSTRAINED ATTITUDES 

arranged the poet's idioms in classes and sub- 
classes and convicted his co-ordinate clauses of 
illicit intercourse? Dr. Drjbosh is a mere pupil 
of the Drier Criticism, of which sad science 
masters are to be found everywhere, not only 
in college chairs of literature, but in newspa- 
pers, magazines, reading circles and women's 
clubs. Few people read a poet nowadays. 
They take a course in him. Some one arranges 
him first into an early, a middle and a later 
period. Somebody builds an approach to his 
" works " and somebody else a trestle over 
them. A Dr. Dowden may perhaps be found 
who will show how the buoyant tone of the 
poet's youth was tempered by the reflective note 
of his middle age. Then there is his relation 
to his time and to other times and the pedi- 
gree of his main idea and whether poetry had 
ever broken out in the family before, and, if 
so, why, and his likeness to somebody and un- 
145 



CONSTRAINED ATTITUDES 

likeness to somebody else, and the list of his 
ingredients, and how long they had to be 
stirred, and when they actually " came to a 
boil," and what his place was in literature. 

True, Drybosh is a type much loved by col- 
lege presidents, and rewarded usually with a 
Ph. D. (no mere ornamental appendage, but 
the indispensable prehensile tail for academic 
climbing), and often promoted to a special lit- 
erary chair for dehumanising the humanities. 
But to be a Drier Critic, whether of the college 
chair or not, that is the best way to begin, and 
the Drier Criticism is at this day inexpugnable. 
For by means of it a man who has no heart 
for his subject may still draw from it his daily 
bread. Commensalism is by no means limited 
to bivalves, but runs all through the Drier Crit- 
icism. Shakespeare to his commentators is as 
the oyster to the oyster crab. The very defi- 
nition of commensalism reminds one of the 
146 



CONSTRAINED ATTITUDES 

latest essay on Browning or Walt Whitman; 
and why rebuke the manners of invertebrates, 
whether literary or marine? In all these mat- 
ters one should strive for a more than human, 
an almost zoological, charity, and the hope 
that even a Ph. D. may have its use in nature. 
Hundreds of naturally book-shy people, dis- 
liking the essentials of literature, are kept busy 
in its neighbourhood by just such tinker- work 
in its non-essentials; or they may at least be 
made to tarry near by papers on the " human 
side" of him, how the great man looked, 
wherewithal he was clothed, whence his 
thoughts came, and what he ate. I have 
before me a " Chat with an Author," pro- 
fusely illustrated, and taking up the best 
part of a page of a newspaper. In 
the upper left-hand comer is the author's full 
face. At a distance of two inches to the right 
is his profile, the intervening space being filled 
147 



CONSTRAINED ATTITUDES 

by a picture of a rose from the author's gar- 
den. In the lower left-hand comer is the 
author's front door. In the middle is a larger 
picture of the author, this time including his 
legs and the library table. In the right-hand 
corner is the library table again, but this time 
without the author, and below the library table 
may be seen an elm-tree belonging to the au- 
thor. These are not the mementoes of the dead. 
The author is still living. The " chat " itself 
abounds in the same reverent miscellany. The 
author declares his preference for high ideals 
as opposed to low ones, and the interviewer 
jots it down. He breathes, and the interviewer 
notes it. A similar " chat " follows with an- 
other author, also " in the public eye," who 
supplies three portraits and maintains with 
equal firmness that high ideals ought to be 
raised and their seeds freely distributed. And 
so it goes. Scores of these literary interviews 
148 



CONSTRAINED ATTITUDES 

were appearing at that time, some papers mak- 
ing them a regular feature of Sunday or Sat- 
urday supplements. They were studies in ef- 
faced personality. Not a tumultuous or self- 
willed person at any time, the American author 
on these occasions faded completely away. He 
seemed a jelly-fish floating on the current of 
universal assent and owing his success, one 
would say from his remarks, not to any efforts 
of his own but to the country's willingness. It 
may have been the fault of the interviewer that 
he could detect in these authors only the qual- 
ities that are common to the race, and record 
only those sentiments which it would be a sin 
for mankind not to share. But I remember 

that one of them was made to say: 

" The atmosphere in which ideals are found must be 
preserved to insure their accuracy, and atmosphere is 
the divine promise of ideals that the true artist finds 
wrapped around an otherwise sordid fact." 

And the other interviews abounded in just 

149 



CONSTRAINED ATTITUDES 

such comatose passages. Perhaps it was due 
to the benumbing effect of publicity. Just as 
many animals will not touch their food in the 
presence of man, so there may be authors who 
will not use their minds if they think anybody 
is watching them. Excited by the camera, and 
unmanned by the sense of impending advertise- 
ment, they are on these occasions not them- 
selves, often utterly swooning away into the 
general morality. Later, perhaps, they find 
they have been saying that the world on the 
whole is growing better every day, or if it is 
not it ought to be, and that they do their best 
literary work between meals and with an ear- 
nest purpose, and that this is "a great country, 
and culture club's are dotting the prairies, and 
the atmosphere is full of ideals, plenty for 
everybody, so give the baby one. Which invol- 
untary remarks, subjoining a scene of pillage, 
wherein their profiles, full faces and frock coats 
CL50 



CONSTRAINED ATTITUDES 

alternate with chairs, desks, tables, detached 
doors, bulrushes, twigs and other objects torn 
from the premises, constitute what is known as 
a literary " chat " published for the benefit of 
persons who might have taken grave offence at 
anything more intimately literary. 

Apparently one of the chief objects of writ- 
ing about books to-day is to entice these alien 
and reluctant souls into their vicinity and to 
comfort the aching hearts of " Culture "- 
seekers with the sense that " Culture " has been 
attained. Readers are seized in the midst of 
their reading with a mad Chautalkative phil- 
anthropy, and disdaining their own digestions, 
tell us what to read. I am constantly receiving 
advice as to my book consumption from people 
who look starved. " Culture " is always preoc- 
cupied with my conversion. There are writers 
for the London Bombardinian who have never 
read a line except for the discipline of me. In 
151 



CONSTRAINED ATTITUDES 

my own country there is the literature of the 
helping hand, more active than the Salvation 
Army. Unselfish men running back and forth 
all their lives between their books and me; de- 
voted women telling me how to approach poets 
who are by no means fugitive ; engines of liter- 
ary *' uplift," ably manned or womaned, from 
heavy, hoisting, academic derrick to smoothest 
of ladies' escalators ; societies formed to 
make me feel as if I had read what I have not ; 
road houses on the way to every well-known 
author for the pilgrims who never arrive. In 
England the duty which the man who has read 
something owes to the man who has not is 
tinged, to be sure, with a certain sternness. 
The Briton with a bit of literary knowledge in 
him makes it a class distinction, accentuating 
the ignominy of the man who has it not, point- 
ing more unmercifully than we do to the horrid 
152 



CONSTRAINED ATTITUDES 

gap between them — but always for that vulgar 
person's good. With us there are more who 
lend a hand or smooth the pillow. But com- 
mon to this abounding helpfulness is the ten- 
dency to begin too soon. Too soon does the 
thought of others extrude all other thoughts. 
Too early and devotedly do readers plunge into 
the care of all minds but their own. The self- 
indulgent partaker is rare; the toil-spent, lit- 
eral-minded, ill-nourished, eleemosynary book- 
executive or taste-commissioner is almost the 
rule. 

I forbear to add any reflections of my own to 
the vast body of expository or satiric comment 
on this familiar democratic tendency, but I do 
protest against the view that even the most 
solemn of these missionaries are people who 
take themselves in the least seriously. There 
is no point in the common gibe about taking 
153 



CONSTRAINED ATTITUDES 

one's self too seriously. These people are swept 
away from themselves on waves of premature 
benevolence. In a humanitarian era they are 
clean gone into other-mindedness, having no 
private tastes, only ministerial inclinations, no 
personal pleasures, only social subsidiary utili- 
ties. These are not the cares of your self-seri- 
ous person. The more seriously he took him- 
self, the more lightly would he be apt to take 
the duties of this literary motherhood. He 
would leave us to make our way as best we 
might into Meredith or toward Dante or under 
Shakespeare or around Browning. No sign- 
posts from him, or guide-books, pathfinders, 
step-ladders, " aspects," " appreciations," cen- 
tral thoughts, dominant notes, real messages, 
helps to, peeps at, or glimpses of; in short, 
none of the apparatus of literary approach, 
and none of the devices for getting done with 
154 



CONSTRAINED ATTITUDES 

authors. For what should he care — that seri- 
ously-selfish man — about our propinquitie-s and 
juxtapositions, our first views and early totter- 
ings? Sauve qui pent would be his feeling in 
these matters, coupled with no especial unwill- 
ingness to see us hanged. 

A foolish phrase, that of taking one's self 
too seriously, and doubly so when applied to 
writers, accusing them, as it does, of quite in' 
credible excesses — thinking too long, feeling 
too keenly, enjoying too heartily, living too 
much. And, as is well known, true literature is 
compact of very lordly egotisms, the work of 
men preoccupied with self-delight. Never a 
philosopher without his own first egotistic cer- 
tainties, or a poet who was not the first adorer 
of his dreams, or a humorist whose own earliest 
and private laughter was not the nearest to his 
heart. Never a good fisher of men in these 
155 



CONSTRAINED ATTITUDES 

waters who had not first landed himself, taken 
himself so very seriously that we cannot mis- 
take him for anybody else, maintained his ego- 
tism in a masterpiece — that most unblushing, 
self-interested device ever yet achieved for the 
preservation of personal identity. 



156 



LITERARY CLASS DISTINCTIONS 



vn 

LITERARY CLASS DISTINCTIONS 

As a reader of current literary comment I have 
often wondered why professional writers about 
books love so dearly to snub one another and 
me. I do not refer to mere phraseological 
heirlooms from a pompous and didactic past, as 
when it is said that " every schoolboy knows " 
something that the writer has but recently as- 
certained, or when the results of much grub- 
bing on his part are introduced as " doubtless 
familiar to the reader." I refer to the practice 
of sniffing at a class of people whom he rates 
very much beneath him — people on whom the 
" subtle something " in B's writings is quite 
thrown away, or who miss the " undercurrent 
of philosophy " in C's humour, or who for some 
159 



CONSTRAINED ATTITUDES 

vile canine reason prefer D to F. " No better 
touchstone of literary taste could be con- 
ceived," says Porphyrogenitus, " than ability 
to appreciate the following passage," and find- 
ing the passage spiritless and altogether medi- 
ocre I learn that I am of the canaille, and so 
would scores of his fellow-writers if all of them 
had not " touchstones " of their own whereby 
they in turn become Vere de Veres, banishing 
him to the butler's pantry. And the more re- 
spectable and British the periodical, the more 
hopeless the lot of the outsider, the blacker the 
unparochial outer darkness. Nowhere has the 
Proper Thing more awful beadles than in the 
unsigned pages devoted to " light litera- 
ture " in the British magazines. For each is 
proud not only of what he does know, but 
of not knowing any more — scienter nes- 
ciens, sapient er indoctus, like the monk of 
old, or like Carlyle's gigman, if you pre- 
160 



CONSTRAINED ATTITUDES 

fer. I am always abashed before the 
British paragrapher, even when he speaks 
kindly of Poe or Walt Whitman or tells 
me Mark Twain is a genuine humorist. Amer- 
ica lies so largely outside his experience and it 
is so clearly her fault and he is so grandly mer- 
ciful to people who did not know they needed 
any mercy, and he is so very like one of his 
country's institutions and so very unlike a fel- 
low-man. 

" It would be churlish to deny," said an edi- 
torial writer for the London Bomhardinian at 
the end of a severe rebuke of American taste in 
novels — " it would be churlish to deny that 
America has produced great writers who can 
hold their own with any European or Asiatic." 
Why "churlish," I wonder, and to whom? Is 
the country, then, so tender or the writer so 
Olympian that the cruel words must be with- 
held for fear of crushing? Would they not be 
161 



CONSTRAINED ATTITUDES 

the words of a simple, harmless, unknown, pers- 
piring man with space to fill and possibly a 
printer's devil waiting and ideas hanging back 
and no means of making sure of anything under 
the sun and only some haphazard personal 
tastes and private guesses to rely upon? Why, 
then, that Atlantean manner, as if responsible 
to the man in the moon for letting the world 
slip ? 

Surely readers must understand the situation. 
There is nothing papal about that well-worn 
editorial chair wherein he wriggles, nor is he 
by any magic transformed into an oecumenical 
council, vox populi, enlightened public opinion, 
consensus of the learned, fourth estate, moral 
bulwark, or anything else more representative 
or apostolic or numerous than a man with a 
pen and an ink-pot. Nowhere, it would seem, 
could a literary opinion be expressed with less 
concern for the susceptibilities of nations than 
162 



CONSTRAINED ATTITUDES 

in the unsigned pages of a British magazine. 
Yet nowhere do words imply a more awful 
sense of their own consequences. I presume a 
man is actually not committing his publishers, 
his family and friends, his country's institu- 
tions and her flag any more deeply by express- 
ing an opinion in the pages of a British maga- 
zine than in the pages of an American book. 
Yet here am I quite free and unconscionable 
toward any poets or prose writers on the face 
of the globe. It is not out of kindness that I 
spare French literature, and I would as lief be 
churlish as not to the literatures of England, 
Spain, Germany, the age of Pericles, any coun- 
try or any period, and may frankly tell them 
the sweet or bitter truth — I like them, I like 
them not. When I reprove a country's litera- 
ture that country seems to know by instinct 
that it is not her fault. Mid-Victorian Brit- 
ish poets, post-Lincoln American poetasters, 
163 



CONSTRAINED ATTITUDES 

Greeks, Romans, Scandinavians, whoever they 
may be, they ask no mercy from my powerful 
though undistinguished pen. Are they really 
in any greater fear of British weekliness? 

But this approaches the character of Pods- 
nap, and the actual, full-fledged British Pods- 
nap, as you sometimes find him in the maga- 
zines, is a creature to be prized. I always clip 
and preserve his sayings, having something of 
a collector's mania for good specimens of the 
breed. Here is one that I have treasured: 

"We question whether the time is not now rapidly- 
approaching when it will be necessary for all sane and 
orthodox people to inquire of any new person that may 
be brought to their notice, * Are you a Socialist or an 
Atheist? ' and in the event of an answer being given 
in the affirmative to express extreme regret at being 
unable to go any further with the acquaintance." 

Taking absurdity for absurdity, I never 
could see why the highly prized British types 
in comedy and satiric fiction were any more 
164 



CONSTRAINED ATTITUDES 

valuable than many of these actual contribu- 
tors to decorous British periodicals, for exam- 
ple, the Hortator or the Bombardinian. And 
what are they for, if not for the pleasure of a 
distant people? At home custom no doubt 
stales their exquisite pomposity. Probably the 
native Briton, subdued as he is to the respect- 
able tradition, takes it as a matter of course 
that there should be scores of these anonymous 
beings episcopating in an ink-pot, binding and 
loosing, delimiting the mind's permissible ac- 
tivities, dividing the earth by meridians of pro- 
priety, puffing up at the touch of an alien 
thought like a balloon-fish out of water when 
you tickle him. But in the more inquisitive 
soil of this country those large incurious Pods- 
naps will not grow — not, at least, the best of 
them, the genuine, full-bodied, calm, thought- 
proof, opinion-tight British ones. 

I can no longer regard, said a recent writer 
165 



CONSTRAINED ATTITUDES 

for the Bomhardinian, I can no longer regard 
the Antipodes as a hopeful portion of the 
earth's surface. And there the matter rests. 
We shall never know what passed between him 
and the Antipodes — ^whether the Antipodes 
were wicked or merely careless, whether it was 
deliberate and personal or something impulsive 
and Polynesian, " so unlike the home life of our 
dear Queen." We know only that nothing 
henceforth shall pass between them. The ac- 
quaintance is at end. And again: 

" We have been taken to task for saying that Amer- 
ica was no more civilised than Japan." 

And then, staunch old Podsnap that he is, he 
puts his foot down and says it again, and so 
settles the matter. Germany's turn next, and 
the Orient and the Tropic of Cancer and cer- 
tain tribal doings of Africa, very ungentle- 
manly to say the least. No nonsense about 
Podsnap. He is not the man to shilly-shally 
16Q 



CONSTRAINED ATTITUDES 

with a hemisphere, and he does not mince his 
words. But if a continent behaves properly, 
Podsnap is wilHng to admit it. He is not nar- 
row-minded, only firm. If, as Dickens said, 
Podsnap once disapproved of Asia, Asia at that 
time gave him cause, and since then he has had 
occasion to speak kindly of Asia several times. 
When Asia makes an honest effort to please 
Podsnap she is not repulsed. Asia under re- 
spectable institutions — House of Lords, Lon- 
don County Council — would find Podsnap 
ready to let bygones be bygones. He would 
do as much for America, though for the pres- 
ent he has dismissed her. Podsnap will forgive 
any grand division of the earth's surface that 
is truly sorry. 

And who are these people that take Podsnap 

to task and would strip him of his opinions? 

If they are Americans, as some of them profess 

to be, they Are disloyal to the spirit of their 

167 



CONSTRAINED ATTITUDES 

country. The land that restores a diplodocus, 

that would have liked to purchase Stonehenge, 
that actually imports Rameses and pays al- 
most any price for an historic background, no 
matter whose ; the country where few can afford 
to keep their own rattletraps so highly are they 
rated as hi j outer le, where the keepsake is kept 
by some other family, and the soap-boilers of 
one generation become the vases of the next 
and the warming-pans its mantelpiece orna- 
ments; the land whose young women may be 
seen at any time in ancient foreign cities ejacu- 
lating " Quaint " much as the duck quacks and 
telling the natives they are " dear old things," 
will always resent a retort upon Podsnap. For 
it is prompted by the desire to change him, and 
although that, luckily, is impossible, the wish 
to do so is none the less base. To remove an 
opinion from a certain type of Englishman 
would be an act of vandalism. 
168 



CONSTRAINED ATTITUDES 

For the truth is, Podsnap, outside the printed 
page, is growing rare, which enhances his value 
to all who love to meet the things they found 
in Mid-Victorian novels. The crumpets are 
what they were ; so is the ale ; so is a cabman ; 
but a man may traverse the length and breadth 
of the British Isles and never meet a genuine 
Podsnap. Indeed, the traveller brings back 
tales of a careless openness of mind utterly 
alien to Podsnap. Everywhere outside print 
are the signs of slackened fibre and a surface 
glitter of decay in the manhood that was Pod- 
snap's. Even in print there are only a few 
publications to w^hich the alien may turn with 
a reasonable chance of finding an absolute 
Podsnap. All the rest are honeycombed with 
knowledge and tainted with new-fangled rela- 
tive views of things. 

But this, I fear, is digressive. To return to 
more purely literary class distinctions: Even 
169 



CONSTRAINED ATTITUDES 

when by accident my tastes are momentarily in 
accord with some writer for the Bombardiniariy 
I cannot help feeling for the others, those vul- 
gar others, " half-educated," " bourgeois," 
" suburban," who, say what you will, must 
somehow be aware of their condition, and suffer 
keenly. But it is given to no man to remain 
long among "Discriminating Readers." Suc- 
cessive writers hew them down, till, if you fol- 
low literary journalism far enough, not one 
soul is left to blush at the tale of his own ex- 
clusiveness. It comes to the same anarchy in 
the end, not only among the frank literary ego- 
tists, men of " confessions," men of " para- 
dox," but among the severest academic persons 
full of grave discourse about the " best literary 
traditions," recognised standards and the like, 
speaking apparently for a class, yet each using 
his scale of values as a personal step-ladder to 
overtop the next. "In his treatment of Na- 
170 



CONSTRAINED ATTITUDES 

ture," says the Literary Palladium, speaking 
of some undistinguishable person, " a prosaic 
thoroughness mars artistic effect." " As a 
matter of fact," retorts the Weekly RTiada- 
manthus, " precisely the opposite is true : A 
poetic thoroughness heightens artistic effect." 
And so it goes. Nor is it a merely rhetorical 
certainty. These strange creatures really feel 
all the absoluteness of pure mathematics or of 
childhood — and in regard to matters which in 
the long run will be ranged with millinery and 
waistcoat buttons. 

The outskirts of literature, like the fringe 
of "our best Society," are full of these queer 
meticulous beings, concerned with Heaven 
knows what pass-words and cachets and easily 
horrified little gentilities — anxious debaters of 
what's what and who's who, and the minutiae 
of precedence and the things one ought to seem 
to know and the ins and outs of literary table 
171 



CONSTRAINED ATTITUDES 

manners. And the man who sips Walter Pater 
in old china must on no account be seen with the 
man who eats raw Kipling with a knife. And 
in the absence of any personal distinction there 
is this awful sense of class distinctions, con- 
veyed in many shrugs and shudders and little 
screams; and books are neither loved nor 
hated ; and " Culture " must declare itself or it 
would never be suspected; and you guess that 
a man is fully educated, because he calls some 
other man " half-educated " and seems to think 
it a very dreadful thing ; and vulgarity is not a 
quality of the mind but a degree of literary 
information; and were it not for the exclama- 
tory derision for the " half-baked " on the part 
of gentlemen who, presumably, are completely 
baked, I defy you to tell the difference. Such 
are the higher planes to-day of literary jour- 
nalism, whence come the warnings to us sordid 
folk below, and the vulgar rich look up and 
17^ 



CONSTRAINED ATTITUDES 

turn away again (small blame to them) and 
build still larger soap-boxes on the green, and 
the " tired business-man " with averted eyes 
flees faster to the roof-garden, and Western 
colleges add new schools of dentistry with funds 
diverted from the " liberal arts " — and I am go- 
ing to buy a paper collar and learn to chew 
tobacco if I can. Such " true refinement " 
would certainly be an appalling thing to have 
happen to one. 

Why has no Anglo-Saxon writer taken the 
hint from M. Lemaitre's little paper on le 
snobbisme litteraire and carried the idea fur- 
ther? M. Lemaitre, of course, faltered miser- 
ably, for what could a Frenchman know of 
anything so intimately ours as le snobbisme 
litteraire? It is unfair to call it as some do an 
" academic " quality, thus debasing that honest 
word. Certainly detachment does not account 
for itj> or a critical temper, or much reading, 
173 



CONSTRAINED ATTITUDES 

or a contemplative habit. To write spiritlessly 
of spiritual things, to cheapen " what is most 
dear," to read merely to give advice, to make 
rules for genius and frame little definitions of 
greatness, to turn your back upon the crowd 
only that the crowd may see your back, to refer 
to vague standards and exhibit vague con- 
tempts — this is not the " academic " hfe. It is 
high life in Philistia, where the breath of one's 
nostrils is le snohbisme Utteraire* 



174f 



THE ART OF DISPARAGEMENT 



VIII 

THE ART OF DISPARAGEMENT 

I HAVE lately read an inordinate amount of 
hostile criticism, especially as employed in 
literary controversy, drawn less by any expec- 
tation of learning the truth than by the hope of 
being warmed by the violent language. The 
point of view is the main point in hostile criti- 
cism, and yet it is the last point that the critic 
ever makes clear to the person whom he criti- 
cises. All my life long I have been sitting in 
judgment on other people and they on me. 
Had there been any means of executing the 
sentence, I should have hanged many of them, 
and I myself should have many times been 
hanged ; but the arm of the law does not reach 
our pet aversions, and if it did, they would go 
177 



CONSTRAINED ATTITUDES 

to the gallows quite ignorant of the real nature 
of their offence. For criticism is very largely 
the art of assigning the wrong reason — a 
trumping up of sententious excuses, a 
straining after the point of view of society, 
or posterity, or the angels, or other critics, or 
the " cultivated few." Criticism stripped of 
its public robes of office is generally a private 
whim. That is what makes controversy often 
seem so strange to the non-combatants, espe- 
tially literary controversy, turning as it does 
on private tastes which masquerade as public 
duties. 

Here, for example, is our old friend. Profes- 
sor Wqodside, author of numerous volumes 
in praise of rusticity and the quiet life, and 
perhaps of a dozen others by the time this com- 
mentary appears, one of the most harmless of 
present writers. He paused for a moment 
some time ago and addressed a reply to his 
178 



CONSTRAINED ATTITUDES 

critics. They had taken, it seems, a moral tone 
with him, complaining that his insistence on 
the quiet virtues and contemplative life tended 
to unmanly acquiescence. Retorting in the 
same moral strain, he said there was no ten- 
dency in his writings to underrate the energies 
of active life but only to deny that the selfish 
desire of personal success was the proper mo- 
tive for them. So it came to the usual impasse 
between a man and his critics. I hasten to as- 
sure any one whose hesitating eye may have 
travelled to this point that I am not going to 
discuss the moral tendency of Professor Wood- 
side's books. I mention the matter merely as 
an instance of the hypocrisy of critics gener- 
ally. 

We belong to a race that dearly loves 
to moralise an essentially unmoral situation. 
We hide personal dislike behind moral disap- 
proval if we can, and if there is any way of con- 
179 



CONSTRAINED ATTITUDES 

verting a private distaste into terms of public 
disaster, we find it. It Is, I presume, bred in 
the bone, and I dare say, as a critic, I too 
should, if anybody poked me through the bars 
or set before me the food I did not like, utter 
the same irrelevant moral outcries, but that 
does not make the thing seem, in an honest in- 
terval, any less preposterous. It is too obvious 
that we damn people the deepest for the things 
tkey cannot help and love them for the random 
gifts of nature. We freely forgive all the ras- 
cals in literature from Benvenuto Cellini down 
— Sterne for his snivelling, Boswell for his 
truckling, Samuel Pepys for his mean little 
heart. We spend our days in invidiously rat- 
ing one man above another and one woman 
above all others, edging away from estimable 
gentlemen at our clubs, dining with traitors. 
The rule applies as often in literature as in 
daily life that we could better spare a better 
180 



CONSTRAINED ATTITUDES 

man. We all know it and we all act upon it, 
but I doubt if there has ever been an Anglo- 
Saxon critic who has not at some time lied 
about it. 

The hypocrisy, of course, is in inverse ratio 
to the power of self-analysis. There are 
times when I half believe I hate Smith on 
principle, for there is nothing about Smith to 
lure me away from the most minute solicitude 
for the general good. In Smith's presence, 
the mind, having, as you may say, no personal 
interests, becomes intensely public-spirited 
and feels like a picket of the public conscience 
as against Smith, ready to shoot for hearth 
and country the moment a moral twig snaps. 
If the devil talked like Smith, what a pleasure 
to be a Christian soldier ! In a sanguine mood 
I can almost prove that the devil does talk 
like Smith. Then along comes Jones, thrice 
as pernicious, but more beguiling, and not 
181 



CONSTRAINED ATTITUDES 

one blow do I strike for an endangered uni- 
verse, although Jones, reduced to a moral syl- 
lablis, Jones, issued ^n pamphlet form per- 
haps by one of Professor Woodside's critics, 
would surely be an improper text-book for 
the human race. But I would not have him 
thus reduced. It is only when a living man 
is no more to us than a teaspoon that we 
think exclusively of his moral medicine to an 
ailing world; and so it is with a living book. 
Having no interest in Shakespeare as a poet, 
Tolstoi and Mr. Bernard Shaw very naturally 
hold him to strict account as a philanthro- 
pist, missionary, Fabian lecturer, early Chris- 
tian. When we are not amused, we remember 
our moral lessons to humanity, and we can al- 
ways find some large ennobling reason for not 
being amused. If we do not love Shakespeare 
let us say it is because Shakespeare did not 
love the poor. And when it comes to the 
18^ 



CONSTRAINED ATTITUDES 

"objective" critics, as they call themselves, 
dissectors, classifiers, teachers of taste, 
strange beings fatally absorbed in such prob- 
lems as how to find the greatest common fac- 
tor of Mark Twain and the Book of Job, 
there is, I believe, little liking for any man's 
company. That is why they so often cut out 
the "central thought" of an author and 
throw the rest of him away. 

But to return to the subject of verbal con- 
flicts, of which I have often been an inter- 
ested observer. I once attended an important 
encounter between Pragmatists and Anti- 
pragmatists. A great many other ill-quali- 
fied persons have had their say about Pragma- 
tism, so why not I? To be sure, I cannot 
settle oflPhand the question, What is Truth? 
1 — at least not so completely but that a doubt 
may linger in some minds after I have spoken. 
But though I shall not insist on my authority 
183 



CONSTRAINED ATTITUDES 

as a metaphysician, I do set up as a connois- 
seur of word-battles, with rather a pretty 
taste, never having missed, so far as I recall, 
any chance to overhear a literary altercation. 
Speaking, therefore, as an amateur of these 
savage spectacles, as a student of bitterness 
and rancour, of the He given and returned, of 
the evasion, the cross-purpose, the word-trap, 
the moral bomb-shell, and the harsh laugh of 
logical supremacy, I do not hesitate to class 
the pragmatlst polemics. In all that pertains 
to the noble art of wrangling, among the very 
best of recent misunderstandings. It is not 
too technical. Of course, if the anti-prag- 
matist really set out to find what the prag- 
matlst was about, it might be difficult for us 
to follow, but philosophers fight like other 
men, and combat is not Interpretation, They 
had rather thump a pragmatlst than explain 
him, and quite right, too, and most fortunate 
184 



CONSTRAINED ATTITUDES 

for us outsiders, for a thump is clearer than 
an explanation. That is why we simple folk 
may, without impropriety, attend these prag- 
matistic encounters, for controversies are 
never philosophic even when philosophy is the 
theme; and when once the philosopher loses 
his head there remains nothing about him that 
need abash a common person. 

The anti-pragmatists won two remarkable 
verbal triumphs. The first occurred in the 
following passage in a somewhat elaborate 
and altogether serious attack on Pragmatism: 

" And now, to make matters perfectly clear, let us 
apply to this radical pragmatic meaning of truth the 
same illustration which was used in the preceding lec- 
ture to bring out the exact meaning of the correspon- 
dence theory. Poor Peter, you will remember, has a 
toothache, and John, who is thinking about his friend, 
has an idea that Feter has a toothache. As for the 
pragmatist the truth of an idea means its * efficient 
working,* its * satis factoriness,* *the process of veri- 

185 



CONSTRAINED ATTITUDES 

fication,' the truth of John's idea will 'consist in' 
its satisfactoriness to John, in its efl&cient working, in 
its verifying itself. If it works, if it harmonises with 
John's later experiences of Peter's actions, if it leads 
in a direction that is worth while, it is true (a state- 
ment to which, indeed, all might assent), and its truth 
consists in this working, this harmony, this verification 
process. John's thought, the pragmatist insists, be- 
comes true only when it has worked out successfully, 
only when his later experience confirms it by being con- 
sistent with it — for remember truth is not verifiability, 
but the process of verification. * Truth happens to an 
idea. It becomes true, is made true by events.' At the 
time when John had the thought about Peter the 
thought was neither true nor false, for the process of 
verification had not yet begun, nothing had as yet hap- 
pened to the idea. It becomes true, is made true by 
events, as John thought, but, all the same, John's 
thought was not true. It did not become true until 
several hours afterward — in fact, we may suppose, not 
until Peter, having cured his toothache, told John about 
it. The thought, 'Peter has a toothache,' thus as it 
happens, turns out not to have been true while Peter 
actually had the toothache, and to have become true 
only after he had ceased to have a toothache." 

. 186 



CONSTRAINED ATTITUDES 

In like manner, another writer made short 
work of a certain essay on the Ambiguity of 
Truth— 

The reader who will, throughout this essay on the 
ambiguity of truth, substitute "butter" for "truth" 
and " margarine " for " falsehood," will find that the 
point involved is one which has no special relevance to 
the nature of truth. There is " butter as claim," i, e., 
whatever the grocer calls butter; this, we will suppose, 
includes margarine. There is " butter validated," 
which is butter that, after the usual tests, has been 
found not to be margarine. But there is no ambigu- 
ity in the word " butter." When the grocer, pointing 
to the margarine, says, " This is butter," he means by 
** butter " precisely what the customer means when he 
says, " This is not butter." To argue from the gro- 
cer's language that " butter " has two meanings, one of 
which includes margarine, while the other does not, 
would be obviously absurd. Similarly when the rash 
man, without applying any tests, affirms " this belief 
is true," while the prudent man, after applying suit- 
able tests, judges "this belief is not true," the two men 
mean the same thing by the word "true," only one of 
them applies it wrongly. 

187 



CONSTRAINED ATTITUDES 

The spirit of these remarks is plain to the 
least technical of observers. It is not philos- 
ophy; it is war. No man in philosophic mood 
would ever have contrived that toothache pit- 
fall; he would have doubted rather his own 
understanding. He would have consulted 
with pragmatists in advance — it was clearly a 
matter for consultation — and told them what 
a turn they had given him, how they seemed 
to say that if Peter had a toothache and John 
said so, John lied, but, of course, they could 
not mean it, and would they kindly 
explain what they did mean? And so of the 
other man — ^he would have gone straight to 
the enemy with his butter question, more in 
curiosity than in hatred, and asked for a 
plain statement of the pragmatist view of the 
butter-margarine relation, which is, I believe, 
Butter is as butter does. By going to him 
with his dilemma he could easily have had 
188 



CONSTRAINED ATTITUDES 

both homs of it removed, but he did not wish 
to do so. He wished to retain them for pur- 
poses of impalement. There you have the 
spirit of the conflict. When the battle mood 
is on him, one does not wish to understand the 
foeman. Time spent in understanding is 
time lost in battle, and no good word-fighter 
will ever seek an enemy's meaning when there 
are verbal shifts by which that enemy may be 
proved insane. 

But in purely literary or journalistic fields 
of contest there is, I fear, not only a falling 
off in the quality of the indignation, but a 
growing reluctance on the part of journalists 
and men of letters to say the first hot, natural, 
senseless thing that occurs to them, thus di- 
minishing what was once a source of lively 
public entertainment. Prizing as I believe 
most readers do any form of literary anima- 
tion even when arising from bad blood, I al- 
189 



CONSTRAINED ATTITUDES 

ways hasten to these scenes of verbal conflict 
in the hope of seeing manly blows exchanged. 
The eyes of the cat are greener and her tail is 
handsomer when she fights. It is not unrea- 
sonable to expect as much of authors. Self- 
love has ever been a rich literary vein. Ad- 
mirable consequences have flowed from its 
wounds and many a good poem has followed 
a puncture. Great happiness has often been 
shed upon the world by the simple process of 
pricking an author. But in no recent literary 
encounter have I found anything at all com- 
mensurate with the hostile intentions — not a 
" Parthian dart," or an " envenomed shaft," 
or a "flick on the raw" or a "well-directed 
thrust," or any of the mordancies, causticities, 
pilloryings, unmaskings, witherlngs, and ex- 
coriations which connoisseurs in literary bit- 
terness delight to describe. It has been a sad 
display] of verbal impotence, humiliating to 
190 



CONSTRAINED ATTITUDES 

two warlike Anglo-Saxon nations. Often the 
rage is barely articulate, passing off in mere 
brief cries of "fool," " clown," " driveller," 
and "mountebank," as If the hater had run 
short of breath. Somebody calls the enemy a 
" charlatan." Another says " self-advertiser " 
and lets It go at that, — a teiTn, by the way, 
that applies as truly to the prophet as to the 
fool. 

"Why do you box my ears In public?" 
said a well-known writer of the present day to 
his foeman, who had accused him of using too 
many words. Rather a sickly attenuation of 
the good, old-fashioned "reply to my critics." 
You have a " pygmy soul," wrote another 
warrior, and if Emerson were now living and 
should see you, Emerson would be " very much 
surprised." A playwright disliking a review 
of his play in a magazine, wrote to the editor, 
saying that the critic who wrote it was evl- 
191 



CONSTRAINED ATTITUDES 

dently quite " drunk," to which the editor 
replied that this was an " outrageous sugges- 
tion," for, as a matter of fact, he had writ- 
ten the article himself; and he went on to 
" confess " further " surprise " that " a man 
of your intellectual attainments should," 
etc., etc. Surprise, indeed, is a frequent 
weapon in these gingerly contests. Attack 
the average writer and he either retorts with 
an expression of " surprise " or remarks su- 
perbly that considering the character of his 
assailant he is "not at all surprised." His 
adversary then expresses amazement at this 
surprise. Why is surprise or the absence of 
it so highly esteemed for polemical purposes? 
Time and again I have been drawn by the 
promise of a good bout between literary ego- 
tisms, heard the hiss of the flying Insult and 
the cry of the wounded vanity, seen the lie 
passing hack and forth, and self-love stripped 
192 



CONSTRAINED ATTITUDES 

for action, only to find the whole thing going 
off in a mere popping of astonishments. 
"You're a Bayswater pessimist," was the an- 
gry editor's parting shot on this occasion. 
" You're a blazing boy," said the playwright 
fiercely. And each withdrew claiming the vic- 
tory. 

These are fair specimens of modern literary 
warfare. No spirit in either attack or de- 
fence; a nose-to-thumb gesture, a flounce, a 
swish of skirts, the banging of a distant door, 
both crow languidly, and so the battle ends 
without pleasure to the looker-on, pain to the 
victim, or relief to the assailant's feelings. 

Shades of a thousand literary battlefields, 
how pitifully we have dwindled ! There is not 
a good round curse amongst us, not a danger- 
ous noun or prickly adjective. Tease an 
editor and out comes his pocket-handkerchief. 
He regrets and deplores the conduct of his ad- 
193 



CONSTRAINED ATTITUDES 

versary. He is very much surprised. It is, 
of course, most disappointing to the reader, 
who ought always to be tertium gaudens at 
these affairs. 

Not that I would bring back the days of 
The Dunciad or of English Bards and Scotch 
Reviewers, You cannot ask an angry modern 
author to plan these long campaigns, or to 
rout the household out at midnight as Pope 
did in his transports of inspired malignity. 
But as a lover of the manly art (for others) I 
do object to this cheating of our gladiatorial 
expectations by exhibitions in spilt milk. For 
a literary fight is, after all, a public occasion. 
It is a promise of warmth and of heightened 
colour and we are justified in demanding some 
little excitement as we hasten to the field. It 
is unseemly that literary wrath, to which we 
are invited, should bring forth no fruit meet 
for publication. 

Moreover, every honest writer is entitled to 
194 



CONSTRAINED ATTITUDES 

at least one dangerous foe, none of your 
splutterers of " fool," " mountebank," and 
" mud prophets," but of the sort who will take 
pains in order to inflict them — ^whose rule for 
the arena shall he Ita feri ut se sentiat mori, 
or if that high standard cannot be attained, 
who will at least so strike that he will amuse 
the amphitheatre. And surely if a writer 
cannot fight well on so good an argument as 
his own self-love (often the most literary part 
of him), there will soon be an end to all sport 
for us spectators. 

Nowadays when a critic is angry, he merely 
seems out of sorts, the wits being lost along 
with the temper. So the sting is drawn from 
the opposition, which is as bad for books as it 
is for politics. It does not mean an era of 
good feeling. It means an era of no feeling 
at all. 

But here I seem to have fallen into the com- 
mon error of rating the value of ridicule ac- 
195 



CONSTRAINED ATTITUDES 

cording to the pains of the intended victim. 
There is of course a risk in those customary 
comparisons between satire and teeth, stilet- 
tos, clubs, vitriol, bullets, scorpions, scalpels, 
gunpowder and harpoons. Though in good 
usage and of great antiquity, they are apt to 
raise our hopes too high. The scalds and 
perforations can seldom be authenticated, and 
even when they can, it does not follow that the 
ridicule is good. To read certain newspaper 
satires over again would be as deadly as any- 
thing they did to the victim. No man would 
do it, even were it proved that a maddened 
Chief Magistrate had fled to the jungle on ac- 
count of them. I suppose I should not really 
value certain lines indited to a " woman with 
a serpent's tongue," even had the lady died of 
them. It is a mistake to measure literary 
merit by the damage it did at the time. 
Literary people, accustomed as they are to 
196 



CONSTRAINED ATTITUDES 

open their eyes very wide at one another and 
exalt the deeds of daring of the pen, have no 
idea what moderate creatures we readers 
really are. The most we can say of " enven- 
omed shafts," as we know them nowadays, is 
that they sometimes almost tickle. The "mer- 
ciless wit " of a leading article may at times 
compete with a breakfast muffin. Few sensa- 
tions are less noticeable than these literary 
emotions that we ought to feel. 

Even when speaking of good satire, writers 
often betray much confusion of mind. One of 
them has praised Pope's satire on Addison 
because it was so true that Addison must have 
felt ashamed. At this late day what do we 
care for Addison's guilty blushes.? As lies 
about Addison they would serve our turn as 
well, for if Addison did not give his little Sen- 
ate laws and sit attentive to his own applause, 
we know the man to do it — we might do it our- 
197 



CONSTRAINED ATTITUDES 

seives at a pinch. Permanent satire Is not 
valued for the author's application but for 
private applications of our own. The best of 
satirists have never bagged their game. Nor 
is it necessary that a single reader shall be 
blasted; It is enough for him to hope that 
some one else is. All of which is obvious; yet 
we still go on reckoning the powers of ridicule 
in terms of estimated fool-destruction. 

Now and then some one bitterly reminds us 
that what this country needs is a genuine satir- 
ist, which of course is true, but he goes on to de- 
pict a scene of quite incredible excitement — < 
every fool up a tree, solemn folk exploding, 
self-complacency punctured, vice pilloried, 
humbug stripped, and a small number of very 
intelligent persons (himself among them) be- 
side themselves for joy at the well-directed 
cuts, bites, bums, stings, and rapier-thrusts. 
Yet he knows as well as we do that we should 
198 



CONSTRAINED ATTITUDES 

all come off without a scratch. When a great 
satire bursts upon, the world the surprising 
thing has always been its utter harmlessness. 
The vices do not "slink to cover," the fool 
does not know he is being killed, the wounds of 
vanity all heal by first intention, and the de- 
flated pomposities of our middle age fill again 
as naturally as the lungs do. And, after all, 
true satire is not the sneering substance that 
we know, but satire that includes the satirist. 
That is the grave omission of the usual satir- 
ist, the omission of himself — nearly all the 
world to the literary person yet left out of 
the world in almost every extremely sarcastic 
survey of it. There can of course be no sound 
derision of things suh specie etemitatis that 
does not include the blushing author. True 
satire is always self-ironical, and would have 
the whole world by the ears. While waiting 
for that very improbable man of genius to blow 
Ll9'9 



CONSTRAINED ATTITUDES 

up to the sky our follies and his own, we might 
be doing useful work at the reduction of lit- 
erary terms to a size more appropriate to the 
little thoughts behind them. But true satire 
was not the aim of the verbal hostilities which I 
have attended so eagerly these many years. 
They sprang from grudges personal and bit- 
ter. Their blows were aimed at single heads. 
The tumult and the shouting promised well. 
And though it was unreasonable to hope that 
either warrior would be wounded fatally, they 
might at least have been more accurately in- 
sulting and more expressively enraged. 



goo 



INTERNATIONAL IMPRESSIONISM 



IX 

INTERNATIONAL IMPRESSIONISM 

We no longer anthropomorphlse the deity 
— at least not openly. The man who called 
his sermon " a bird's-eye view of God " is 
clearly an exception. Nor do we invoke in 
neat pentameters the personified emotions, 
tastes, branches of learning, scientific discov- 
eries, trades and muses. No more of " All 
hail, oh Agriculture " or " Inoculation, heav- 
enly maid, appear." But we make up for it 
with our philosophic wolves and thoughtful 
rabbits and melodramatic hens — no mere fig- 
ures of rhetoric and beast fable, either, but 
certified of eye-witnesses, with affidavits, mind 
you, that cock-robin was killed by the sparrow 
203 



CONSTRAINED ATTITUDES 

with his httle arrow. And especially there is 
the huge imagery of nations, so glib and defi- 
nite, Germany in a word, Italy in a nut-shell, 
immoral France, stolid Britain, types, ten- 
dencies and signs of the times, all dancing 
around on the care-free pages of men whose sole 
aim is to make the best possible story out of 
the least possible experience, but who are ranged 
alongside De Tocqueville and other serious ob- 
servers, as if that sort of thing were their aim. 
We still forget that they come not to see but 
to invent us. 

We forget that for literary purposes this is 
not a country on the map. America is a happy 
guessing-ground, bounded on all sides by the 
Personal Equation and including many paral- 
lels of literary latitude. Its climate varies 
with the health of the visitor and its people 
have only such characteristics as a rapid writer 
can most effectively describe. It is, on the 
204i 



CONSTRAINED ATTITUDES 

whole, entertainingly inhabited, with readable 
race traits, and concise, often epigrammatic, 
national ideals. Differences among the people 
are, as a rule, uninteresting and non-essential. 
The things that occur first to the literary visi- 
tor are at once the most significant and the 
best to say. The main products are unverifi- 
able conclusions, which meet the traveller on 
every side; and, indeed, in sheer point of size 
are more impressive than the skyscrapers. The 
institutions, though varying with the mind's 
eye, are alike In yielding an immediate moral 
lesson. Everywhere you see the national pas- 
time — matching with destiny for beers; every- 
where the national tendency — declining like the 
Roman Empire, though perhaps that fate may 
be averted by the moral soundness which Is at 
the bottom of the American character, as 
shown by two typical gentlemen In the smok- 
ing-room and three significant magazines. 
205 



CONSTRAINED ATTITUDES 

Growth Is wonderful, including the growth of 
the writer's convictions. The distances seem 
incredible. It is six hours from New York to 
Washington, and Chicago is even further from 
the truth ; and there Is room In the single State 
of Pennsylvania for several European generali- 
ties, 

I have been moved to these remarks by read- 
ing the accumulated press clippings in regard 
to a most entertaining volume, which obviously 
belongs to this journalism of inverted pyra- 
mids, but was taken by Americans quite gener- 
ally as an attempt to describe an actual coun- 
try. They found the account " favourable." 
Had It been unfavourable they would no doubt 
have hurled back the Insult In the author's 
teeth. The country is still gallantly de- 
fended in the newspapers against any scur- 
rying foreigner's literary note-book. Ap- 
parently things have not changed much 

me 



CONSTRAINED ATTITUDES 

since a boy of twenty-three brought down 
upon his American notes the vengeance of 
our staunch old home guard in the press 
or since these same sleepless tutelary gentle- 
men repelled a redoubtable humorist or 
argued gravely with the hereditary proclivities 
of a French novelist and a German university 
professor. Meanwhile most of us continue to 
read these books for the pleasure they afford, 
knowing that such truth as they contain is there 
by accident. Who cares, for example, whether 
the man is right or wrong? That is not the 
kind of question to ask that kind of man. We 
like these people for their impulsive ways and 
general air of wildness. We want the fine swing 
of certainty and plenty of prejudice and some 
brisk invective and sarcasm and the first 
thoughts after the first cocktail and the damna- 
tion of Chicago and a guess at the Middle 
West and lots of large advice about abolishing 
20T 



CONSTRAINED ATTITUDES 

Congress and suppressing the rich and inter- 
marrying with coloured people (as a solution of 
the negro problem) , and all that. We want the 
writer's own particular America, the prolonga- 
tion of his own blessed British, Gallic, Teu- 
tonic, Slavic, bilious or sanguine, literary tem- 
perament, a land of personal patches with vast 
areas of omission, peopled mainly by himself 
and quivering with his emotions. To the well- 
trained literary mind, phrase-haunted, fiction- 
rooted, burning for the picturesque and sali- 
ent, what is a country but a good excuse? Any 
new land is a fairyland, and things are as they 
look best in print. To bother him or our own 
heads with vain questions of verisimilitude is, 
to say the least, unsportsmanlike. 

In this instance, the gigantesque journalist 

admitted frankly that he had been in America 

just six weeks, yet from one end of the country 

to the other, to judge from these newspaper 

208 



CONSTRAINED ATTITUDES 

comments, readers were asking if be was fair 
and accurate and properly equipped for his 
task. Many of them praised his " philosophic 
insight," though how they knew he had it is 
by no means clear. Some condemned him as 
" superficial," as if any human being in the 
circumstances could be otherwise; and some 
complained that he was " inconclusive " — fancy 
having to be conclusive about America in six 
weeks. It must have embarrassed the modest 
author, who had not in the least the air of a 
Daniel come to the nation's judgment but of a 
writer in search of literary incentives. As 
well apply astronomical tests to verses to the 
moon. We are still given over to great llteral- 
ness in these matters and cannot permit any 
harmless light literary character to record his 
ferry-boat emotions without harassing our- 
selves about the truth. 

Of course, he and all the other recent 
S09 



CONSTRAINED ATTITUDES 

nation-tasters may, for aught I know, be 
profoundly and enormously right. The man 
who stoutly tells me what the matter is with 
Asia to-day, how Europe is feeling, and whether 
America ever can be cured always has me under 
his thumb. Not being stationed on a sign of 
the Zodiac I am in no position to reply. And 
why should one wish to deny by logic, com- 
parative statistics, ethnology, political science, 
or indeed drag the intellect into the thing at 
all? Is it not pleasant to sit humbly by and 
see the populations of the earth '* sized up," 
and hear Europe talking to America as man 
to man and learn the crisp truth about the 
Tropic of Capricorn, or the century, or modem 
society, or man? Need we be forever asking 
how he got his certitudes, and if it was the 
real America that met him in his boarding- 
house and if he surely grasped the negro prob- 
lem while talking to those two coloured men? 
210 



CONSTRAINED ATTITUDES 

Literary travel is not in search of fact but of 
fluency, and the route always lies away from 
the land of many things to the land where one 
swallow makes a summer. 

Travel refreshes the faith in types. It 
is the rule of present-day helles-Uttres that 
every country shall be peopled with types. 
At home men will not stay long in types, 
splitting up on acquaintance into mere per- 
sonal and miscellaneous Browns and Robin- 
sons, of small use for the larger literary pur- 
poses and refusing absolutely to typify man- 
kind. As to Woman in General, that great 
literary science is often rudely shattered by 
sheer knowledge of one's wife. So off for a 
new land where everybody is an allegory. It 
may be safe for philosophers to stay and scru- 
tinise, but for these brave, vivacious interna- 
tional certainties the land must be skimmed 
and the people merely squinted at; or they, 
211 



CONSTRAINED ATTITUDES 

too, will resolve into Browns and Robinsons 
to the spoiling of good phrases and the blur- 
ring of bird's-eye views. The typical American 
is seen at once or never. There is no hope for 
any gigantesque journalist who does not find 
him on the pier. It is to get rid of facts, not 
find them, that they come, and to escape from 
second thoughts, those sad disturbers of liter- 
ary traffic. It is not to see a new kind of man 
but to see the same kind newly. 

But here is matter for peace-promoting so- 
cieties and leagues of Anglo-American good- 
will, for ambassadorial after-dinner speeches 
and toasts to distinguished guests, for almost 
simultaneously two books have appeared, one 
by an American who admires England and the 
•other by an Englishman who admires America. 
As an American I suppose I ought to dwell 
long and earnestly on the cheerful import of 
this circumstance. For the American thinks 
gl2 



CONSTRAINED ATTITUDES 

it his duty to write on this subject as if he were 
fifty years behind his own feelings and the feel- 
ings of his fellow-countrymen. He assumes 
that the all-important question is whether the 
Englishman, no matter what sort of English- 
man, thinks well or ill of the country as a whole. 
He assumes that this blushing little debutante 
of a country is still intensely anxious about the 
impression that it has made. It would astonish 
us if we were not so used to the strange ar- 
chaisms of our daily press. But just as many 
newspaper writers are still at the Manchester 
stage of political economy, so their patriotism 
is of the tender period when Dickens published 
his Americcm Notes, Journalists have always 
been our most old-fashioned class, being too 
busy with the news of the day to lay aside the 
mental habits of fifty years before. Con- 
strained to chase the aviator in his aeroplane 
on the front page, they sleep with Thomas 
213 



CONSTRAINED ATTITUDES 

Jefferson in the editorial columns. For a 
glimpse of the country's intellectual past we 
are accustomed to turn to the reflective portions 
of the morning newspapers. Reviewers live in 
the old tradition of patriotic solicitude while 
we have gone on into utter recklessness. I 
never met a man, for example, who seemed to 
care whether these visitors thought well or ill 
of the United States. I never read a review 
that did not. 

In the friendly book about America the 
writer declares that he found among "all 
classes of Americans ... a deep and 
noble desire . • . sometimes pathetic but 
always dignified" that the Mother Country 
should understand "her offspring of the 
West." 

This is a very sentimental reading of the 
Americanos interest in the foreigner's opinion 
— a mere product of curiosity, self-conscious- 



CONSTRAINED ATTITUDES 

ness and the desire to " make talk." If the 
writer, who, to judge from his book, is an 
uncommonly serious person, found everybody 
nobly and deeply concerned with the Mother 
Country's opinion. It was no doubt the result 
of conversational embarrassment. With a se- 
rious Briton on one's hands, what else was there 
to do.f^ Those of us who have had conversa- 
tional bouts with serious Britons recall the 
desperate straits to which we were often re- 
duced, the false interests, the impromptu en- 
thusiasms, the nervous garrulities, merely to 
keep the ball rolling. One finds one's self be- 
coming almost hysterically sociable with 
phlegmatic persons. If one man says too lit- 
tle, the other says too much. It seems a law 
of conversation that if one remain a centre of 
gravity the other shall with rather foolish 
rapidity revolve around him. He feels re- 
sponsible for the other's lack of animation — 
^15 



CONSTRAINED ATTITUDES 

tries to bring a gleam into the cold, dead eye. 
An American is unnerved by the British pause 
following an introduction. He will snatch at 
any topic and cling to it out of sheer mental 
loneliness. He is not accountable at these 
times, and the meaning of what he says will 
not bear scrutiny. No American is ever him- 
self in the spurt of talk following those tense 
moments when, a serious Briton having been 
cast upon him, the beating of his own heart 
was the only sound he heard. He will profess 
the most unnatural ardours — asking after a 
stranger's country as he asks after a friend's 
wife: not because he finds the wife interesting, 
but because he hopes she interests the friend. 
People spoke warmly of the Mother Country 
in order to warm this visitor. We overheat 
our conversation as we do our rooms. 

The American writer on England, on the 
other hand, had not even this excuse for his 
delicacy and forbearance. No polite disguise 
216 



CONSTRAINED ATTITUDES 

covers the stark indifference of the English to 
American opinion, and he himself remarks how 
invulnerable their feelings are. 

Yet after a long black list of national hypoc- 
risies, he says: 

" I write these things to explain, not to revile. This 
is a great country." 

And referring to the newspaper practice of 
selecting only the worst news of rival countries 
— crimes, disasters, scandals, he says he for- 
bears to impute any unworthy motive. 

Such assumptions of judicial moderation are 
of course quite thrown away. In the familiar 
field of international impressionism we do not 
look for the " clear, white light of truth," but 
for the colours of personal experience. The 
chief value of these books consists, as I have 
said before, in their* re-discovery of human na- 
ture. 

Thus the American impressionist's book con- 
tains an entertaining chapter on England as 
217 



CONSTRAINED ATTITUDES 

the " land of compromise," arraying antithet- 
ically the pretended virtues and the actual 
vices, the criticism of others and the self-com- 
placency, and presenting a most formidable 
list of inconsistencies, thus: 

A King who is not a King; a free people 
who are not actually free; a constitution which 
does not exist; a nation professing Christian- 
ity, but always at war, sodden with drink, and 
bestowing the highest prizes on the selfish and 
the strong; high principles sacrificed to expe- 
diency; personal freedom politically fettered 
by a House of Lords; contempt for commer- 
cial rivals and blindness to the danger of their 
competition ; an inveterate" preference for do- 
ing rather than thinking. And in the face of 
the various " new problems " — " disestablish- 
ment," " unemployment," " increased taxes," 
" socialism," foreign rivalry and hatreds — no 
new weapon has be^n found! 
218 



CONSTRAINED ATTITUDES 

All of which IS accidentally British, but 
essentially of course it is only human — mere 
marks of the zoon politikon. Under the same 
rhetorical arrangement each land in turn be- 
comes the land of compromise. They are home 
truths, but without the local colour. This is 
saying nothing against it as a chapter in in- 
ternational impressionism. On the contrary, 
comparative reflections would have impaired the 
vivacity. The best way to find new types is to 
forget the old. After all, dilettantes in the 
psychology of races do not cgmpete with the 
hard-headed grubbing specialists. Sizing up 
a nation in this way is just as interesting as 
ever. The literary man is a bom multiplier. 
It is easy for him to characterise a country; 
his imagination has peopled it. Observe the 
astonishing similarity between the Manchester 
bottle-maker whom Matthew Arnold found to 
be perfectly typical of England and the 
219 



CONSTRAINED ATTITUDES 

Oneida chain-maker who " illuminated " for a 
recent British visitor "much that had hitheito 
been dark in the American character." " His 
ignorance," says Matthew Arnold of this pe- 
culiarly British bottle person, "his ignorance 
of the situation, his ignorance of what makes 
nations great, his ignorance of what makes 
life worth living, his ignorance of every- 
thing except bottles — those infernal bot- 
tles." "Making a new world," says the Brit- 
ish observer of this utterly American maker 
of chains, " was, he thought, a rhetorical 
flourish about futile and troublesome activities, 
and politicians merely a disreputable sort of 
parasite upon honourable people who made 
chains and plated spoons." International im- 
pressionists traverse the world to discover the 
people who live next door. So we owe this 
lively chapter about England as the land of 
compromise, not to the writer's perception of 
220 



CONSTRAINED ATTITUDES 

what Is characteristically British, but to his 
revived interest in original sin. 

This particular international Impressionist 
found England a land of success-worship 
where all's well that sells well, and the weakest 
go to the wall, where the problem of serving 
both God and Mammon has been solved; and 
as his heart is on the side of the big battalions, 
he loves her all the better on that account. 
He accepts all ideas at their present commer- 
cial rating. Success can do no wrong and the 
best man comes to the top, and what will be- 
come of England's greatness If she pampers 
her poor? Beware of discouraging thrift. 
The virtues pay and thus we may know they 
are virtues ; and away with socialistic nos- 
trums. In books so casually compounded it 
is absurd to look for a pattern in the rags and 
patches of their thoughts. Thought, after 
all, this wise Polonius might say, is a branch 
221 



CONSTRAINED ATTITUDES 

of etiquette; give us the deeds without the 
thoughts ; find out what souls are worn in the 
better sort of houses and order one of the same 
for yourself. It will keep you with the best 
Society of your day as in lustier times it would 
have kept you a cannibal. If I had to define 
this appraiser of nations I should perhaps say 
that in religion he was a good digestionist, in 
politics a Darwinian and in philosophy, while I 
am not learned enough to place him, I know he 
belonged somewhere in an anti-pragmatist defi- 
nition of their enemies. But having a light 
heart and a half-closed mind and a frank pride 
in his limitations he was just the man for in- 
ternational impressionism, and gave us as good 
a bit of it as we had had for several years. I 
suppose he must rank rather high among the 
nation-tasters. 

In this pleasant but unconscionable pastime 
there is nothing so untidy as exceptions, and 
^22 



CONSTRAINED ATTITUDES 

nothing will more surely spoil a sentence than 
thinking twice. It checks the flow of firm 
conviction if after every telling paragraph 
you write, " On second thoughts this is not 
true." Nor is it by any means needful. 
Readers of international impressionism ought 
by this time to have the converse of almost 
every proposition ringing in their ears as they 
read. 



SS3 



QUOTATION AND ALLUSION 



X 

QUOTATION AND ALLUSION 

The old tradition lingers that quotations or 
bookish allusions will give the look of litera- 
ture to any printed page. Sometimes it is 
followed on the chance that scraps from the 
works of better writers may somehow tide the 
reader over when the man's own thoughts give 
out — a clutch at the skirts of literary gentil- 
ity in the hope of redeeming a natural insig- 
nificance. Sometimes it Is to show that he is 
a man of varied reading, each quotation serv- 
ing as an apothecary's diploma that none may 
deny that he has graduated from the book. 
At all events, It usually has the air of deliber- 
ation, as If the quotation had not come to the 
man, but the man had gone to the quotation. 

9.n 



CONSTRAINED ATTITUDES 

In the old days there were of course some in- 
voluntary quoters, to wit. Burton, in the An- 
atomy, who could not help bubbling over with 
queer, outlandish sayings that he had picked 
up just for fun. But the typical quoter was 
a university man, who, before he wrote a para- 
graph, went on a pot-hunt among the Latin 
poets in order that he might cite triumphantly 
twenty-four lines of Vlrgilian metaphor begin- 
ning, " Not otherwise a Nubian lion with his 
tawny mane." He often fastened them to the 
context by invisible threads, merely saying, 
" As the ancient bard hath so well remarked," 
and pulling out a block of Latin hexameters 
from a drawer in his desk. He could not 
speak of agriculture without dragging in the 
Georgics, or of old age without a phrase from 
Cicero, or of love or wine without a couplet 
from Horace. He simply had to use these 
things, to say nothing of Praetorian guards, 



CONSTRAINED ATTITUDES 

Pierian spring, Parnassus, Arethusa and those 
poor old raddled muses. 

He and his kind multiplied like Australian 
rabbits, and it was not till the middle of the 
last century that English literature began to 
drive them out. Nowadays we are compara- 
tively safe from them, and no one with any 
natural spring of mind ekes out his thought 
with other people's phrases. The rule to-day 
is neither to shun nor to seek. 

In these days, if a man have a little Latin 
or Greek, the good safe working rule is to keep 
it strictly to himself, when his native idiom will 
serve as well, though he is likely to burst with 
his happy secret. We stow these collegiate 
scraps away in the back part of our diction- 
aries. Everyone knows where to find them, 

and nobody thanks the man who takes them 

> 
out. The writers of a hundred or even fifty 

years ago are no guides for us In this matter. 

£29 



CONSTRAINED ATTITUDES 

When Burke wrongly accented a Latin word 
all Parliament knew it, and Wyndham was 
vastly admired for the enormous length of his 
Latin quotations. Now the whole point of the 
thing is gone. Were the best of the old writ- 
ers living now they would never have the air of 
being " echo-haunted of many tongues." Of 
that we may be certain. Even Thackeray 
would be more sparing of his pallida mors, and 
would sometimes omit the Latin form of his 
" black care behind the horseman." 

But although we have in the main discarded 
inapphcable Latin and Greek, here and there 
the old precedent of needless quotation is still 
followed, and only the other day I read in a 
newspaper article, "If a thing is right, it 
ought to be done, said Cobden," recalling the 
old gibe that water is wet on the authority of 
Beza. I have noted the same bit from a for- 
eign language nine times in one newspaper, 
230 



CONSTRAINED ATTITUDES 

and each time could see the paragraph writh- 
ing to make room for it. The Vicar of Wake- 
field's friend, with his two stock phrases from 
the classics, seems almost a burlesque, but he 
was not, and he is not even to-day. There are 
men now living who will use a French word 
when there is an exact English equivalent, and 
then add the equivalent in parentheses — a vile 
form of ostentation and half-hearted at that, 
a sentence like a moustache with one end waxed 
and the other bushy, as if the writer dared to 
be only half-way foppish. There are wretches 
who will quote you Pascal for the sentiment 
that truth will prevail. " Corrupt politics are 
not good politics," says Burke, and " Life is a 
struggle," says Seneca, and " Dare to do 
right," says Cobden, and " Law is the bulwark 
of liberty," as the Lord Chief Justice of Eng- 
land once remarked. The hardened quoter 
cares only for the name, and perhaps, when 
231 



CONSTRAINED ATTITUDES 

pressed for time, will forge it. That may be 
why one sees so many dull sayings with great 
names attached. But many, of course, are 
genuine, and toilsomely gathered for use on the 
day of literary deficit, when the style needs a 
ringlet from Longfellow, or an orotund boom 
from Burke. 

I find, for example, in a recent number of 
the Didactic Monthly, a writer of extraordi- 
nary literosity. In a scant two pages I note 
quotations from Disraeli, John Morley, Thiers, 
Condorcet, Garfield, Seneca, Tacitus, Milton, 
Lincoln, Thucydides, President Harrison, Cob- 
den, and Disraeli again ; also several illustrative 
literary anecdotes, one Latin verse, and three 
lines of a poem in English. He ought not to 
have done it. It makes us ignorant persons en- 
vious. Even when we do know, we must some- 
times try and forget, for it is cruel to be as 
" literary " as you can. Not that I deny the 
232 



CONSTRAINED ATTITUDES 

appositeness of all these literary allusions, but 
a good many of them served only to show in 
what company the writer had been. They 
were, as you might say, merely his literary cre- 
dentials, and even as such are less convincing 
than in the brave old days when there were no 
Dictionaries of Quotation or treasuries of 
prose or verse or Half Hours with Great Au- 
thors or Libraries of the World's Best Litera- 
ture. It is a humane rule never to jingle 
your literary pockets merely to tantalise the 
poor. 

Had one a good literary memory or a full 
note-book (which can be made to look as well) 
one might retort upon these learned Thebans 
somewhat in this wise: New kings are strict, 
said ^schylus {hapas de trachus hostis an 
neon Jcrate), and he might well have said it of 
the newly learned, for they too abate no jot 
of their authorities, but approach all subjects 
233 



CONSTRAINED ATTITUDES 

augustly, clad In the robes of their predeces- 
sors. And for crown jewels, they have those 
*' jewels five words long," which they never 
weary of displaying. Nor do they forget that 
Milton's style was " echo-haunted of many 
tongues," the style for which he became so 
famous and so shunned. They stay very close 
to Milton, But they ignore, alas, many wise 
sayings even from the time of the Chaldees. 
There was Elihu's warning, " Should a wise 
man utter vain knowledge and fill his belly with 
the east wind? " And there was Quintilian, 
who, if I mistake not, implied that whoso would 
seem learned to the vulgar seemeth vulgar to 
the wise. Plato himself was against them, de- 
fending not the borrowing of treasures merely 
for display, but praising rather the mind's ac- 
tivity with its own possessions, and a certain 
high inspired curiosity, for, said he, " a life 
without inquiry {arvexetastos bios) is not livable 
^S4i 



CONSTRAINED ATTITUDES 

by man." And from Plato we may pass to 
John P. Robinson, of whom it is perhaps super- 
fluous to quote the well-known lines : 

John P. 

iRobinson, he 

iSaid they didn't know everything 

Down in Judee. 

Nor is that reading the most fruitful which 
yields the quickest crop, particularly if it be 
only a crop of quotations, for that is like dig- 
ging up your seed potatoes. A mind planted 
with the world's best authors must still wait for 
its own thoughts to grow, for, as Cicero said, 
all the arts have a common element (quoddam 
commune vinculum) , and it is as true of letters 
as of agriculture that, as Sir Thomas Brown 
has somewhere tersely put it, "All celerity 
should be contempered by cunctation." Scraps 
from a great man's writings are no sign of a 
sense of greatness, but many quote them as 
235 



CONSTRAINED ATTITUDES 

clear proof that they have seen Behemoth and 
" played with him as with a bird." As Con- 
fucius said to Julius Caesar, " Be to thine own 
self true," and this implies that you have a 
self, a poor thing, but thine own, submerged 
by other people's words, but still sentient, a 
pale survivor of ten thousand tags and hack- 
neyisms like these which I have used. Some- 
thing off your own bat (to use a coarse post- 
classic figure) is wanted now and then. One 
learns little more about a man from the feats 
of his literary memory than from the feats of 
his alimentary canal. 

When young and helpless I once fell into a 
family that lived by the bad old rule. They 
made it a daily duty to study up things to 
quote, and every Sunday morning at breakfast 
each would recite a passage memorised during 
the week. The steam from the coffee vanished 
236 



CONSTRAINED ATTITUDES 

into literary air, and the muffins, by the time 
we got to them, seemed to be bound in calf. 
They said it helped to fix the thing in mind, 
and though they had no present use for it, 
they thought something might happen that it 
would seem to fit. And they saw to it that 
something did happen, and out it came to the 
end. They lived in a sort of vicious watchful- 
ness. On wet days they conned over their rain 
verse in order to whip out a stanza in the midst 
of weather talk, and if they drove through the 
country they saw nothing for constantly 
mumbling what Wordsworth would have said. 
They would say the passage was doubtless fa- 
miliar, but relentlessly repeat every word. 
Large blocks of poetry would suddenly fall 
athwart the conversation, no one knew whence, 
while with bowed head the startled Philistine 
would wait for the seizure to pass. There was 
237 



CONSTRAINED ATTITUDES 

nothing in that family that you could not 
somewhere read, and the people who once knew 
them, now either visit a library or turn to an 
album of song. To be sure It was somewhat 
unusual, but it shows there Is life In the old 
temptation, and what havoc it still may work. 



^38 



OCCASIONAL VERSE 



XI 

OCCASIONAL VERSE 

They say the modem man does not read 
poetry. I have read many essays on the 
growing dislike for it, and I remember particu- 
larly one very sad interview with a London 
publisher which appeared in a British period- 
ical under the appropriate caption, " The 
Slump in Verse." I recall, too, some lines In 
Punch written at that time, telling us that the 
case was hopeless — 

For men in these expansive times 

(Due, I am told, to fiscal freedom), 
Though earth were black with angels' rhymes, 
Dine far too well to want to read 'era. 

Yet looking back on the past decade I can- 
not escape the conviction that it has been one 
241 



CONSTRAINED ATTITUDES 

of extraordinary prosodical activity. Occa- 
sional verse has never been so abundant or so 
prompt, for poets nowadays are great readers 
of the newspapers, especially of the headlines, 
and trained to sing before the report is con- 
tradicted, almost between successive editions. 

Now I, who never drank of Aganippe well, 
nor ever did in Vale of Tempe sit, may not 
speak with authority in these deep matters, 
but as a warm-hearted fellow-being, anxious to 
see every poet, great or small, put his best foot 
foremost, I may venture to remind them of 
the notoriously small proportion of occasional 
verse that has ever succeeded in rising to the 
occasion. This is the more needful because 
when a poet goes wrong he is forgotten, and 
so the warning is lost. The fugitive poet al- 
most invariably makes his escape, which is not 
a wholesome example. I recall several poetical 
occasions of the last ten years, unjustly for- 



CONSTRAINED ATTITUDES 

gotten by everybody else, for they deserve re- 
membrance for the damage that was done. 

In the first place there was the South Afri- 
can war. It was not in South Africa alone 
that Englishmen were called upon to face the 
horrors of that war. The kind of verses that 
were cabled to us from England every few 
days appealed almost as strongly to our sym- 
pathies as the reports of casualties from the 
front. One after another the leading poets of 
England tried and failed. One group of 
them clinging to classic models, achieved only 
alliteration and Homeric metaphors. These 
were not content till they had employed the 
expression "Afric'B shores." Others, mad 
after colloquialism, were impelled by their 
strictly democratic conscience to use the word 
" bloomin' " in every fourth line. Of the two, 
the " bloomin' " ballad was preferable because 
less pretentious, less like a deliberate assault 
US 



CONSTRAINED ATTITUDES 

upon the muse, and when it was a frank ap- 
peal for subscriptions to some charity, it may 
have been justified by the pecuniary results. It 
was bad enough, however, and the "Afric's 
shore " things were quite unpardonable. When 
England reckoned up her victories she had as 
offset several scores of punctured poets that 
never again could be quite what they once were 
to the public. 

And in France there were Rostand's lines on 
poor old President Kriiger. " No," sang the 
poet, "history has nothing in her cycles finer 
or more tragic than the spectacle of this old 
man in eyeglasses with crepe on his hat " — a 
bald rendering of the French verse, I admit, 
but it deserves no better. Some one commented 
on it rather sadly at the time as proof of " a 
faltering pen and laboured inspiration," which, 
of course, was most unjust as applied to 
merely occasional verse. It was as good as most 
244 



CONSTRAINED ATTITUDES 

of It. Setting the news of the day to music 
is a hard task, and the best of poets need a 
piano-tuner if you insist on banging out an 
accompaniment on them to every press de- 
spatch. And besides there were some swift 
readers in that day who no doubt found much 
beauty in that line, Avec ce crepe a son cJia^ 
peau! He would have been asked to read it 
at an authors' meeting in this country, and 
friends might have crowded around and 
grasped his soft, moist hand, and told him it 
was the best thing he had ever done; and 
within two weeks he might have been lecturing 
on it before the Burial Society and squaring 
it with world politics at the Kansas Woman's 
Club. 

For who are we that we should revile these 
efforts of the foreigner? To be sure during 
the war with Spain our bards were more for- 
bearing and we were singularly free from 
M5 



CONSTRAINED ATTITUDES 

martial poetry of this class. Yet we had poets 
who put up pumping stations at the Pierian 
Spring, poets who supplied the public dinner 
table, who, no matter what the public occasion, 
had as fixed a place at it as music by the band, 
stem-winding poets ever ready to "read some 
little thing," bards of a strange and passion- 
ate promptness, surprised may be, yet turning 
quickly on the tormentor and ripping out an 
ode. And of all the odes that ever burst 
punctually from a poet's heart on the morn- 
ings of anniversaries, odes on unveilings, flag- 
hoistings and layings of corner-stones, odes on 
first shovelfuls and final bricks, odes obituary, 
natal, royal-matrimonial, " sesqui-centennial, 
and millenary, this country has undoubtedly 
produced odes the most perfectly occasional, 
odes the most utterly commemorative. 

As soon as the report of the St. Petersburg 
massacre reached England and America, most 
of the small poets and one or two of the larger 
246 



CONSTRAINED ATTITUDES 

ones set vigorously to work, and in an almost 
incredibly short time the mails were full of 
poems on the Czar. It was not my fortune to 
see many of them, but from such as happened 
my way and from the reports of readers who 
occupied a more exposed position, I inferred 
that either the later ones were all modelled on 
the first or that by a marvellous coincidence 
forty independent inspirations hit on the self- 
same words. So embarrassing was the situa- 
tion that one newspaper announced that it 
could not publish any more poetical rebukes 
of the Czar except on the impossible condition 
that they contained thoughts not presented in 
those already printed; and It decided in ad- 
vance against any poem that should turn on 
the incongruity between the Czar's title of 
*' Little Father " and his unpatemal conduct 
toward his people. It seemed that twenty 
poets a day were discovering that incongruity. 
And since this has happened many times 
247 



CONSTRAINED ATTITUDES 

these past ten years, if indeed something like it 
has not been constantly going on, it seems 
as if the thousand men and women now 
engaged on songs appropriate to the press de- 
spatches should somehow be reminded of the 
simple truth. For despite many conspicuous ex- 
ceptions it is well known that even great poets 
have always done their worst when keeping these 
public engagements. Banquets, birthdays, cor- 
onations, bicentennials, news from the seat 
of war, the laying of comer-stones, earth- 
quakes, assassinations, the return of heroes, the 
thousand and one obviously poetic exigencies 
of the day, have been sung in the lays that are 
hardest to remember. Poet& are by nature un- 
punctual and perverse and of the least use 
when in the greatest hurry to make themselves 
useful. It has been proved that the best poems 
are those which we did not know were wanted 
and that the worst are those which are deliv- 
248 



CONSTRAINED ATTITUDES 

ered on demand; and that occasional verse, be- 
ing of the latter description, merely darkens a 
little the day or the deed, or the lady's album 
that called it forth. Where genius has so 
often failed, it seems as if our milder, modern 
bards might observe more prudence, and await 
more patiently the birth of song, realising 
that it is given to few poets to take time by 
the forelock, or make hay while the sun shines, 
Dr strike while the iron is hot — adages not 
meant for bards but for farmers, steamfitters 
and us old prosers, who are as inspired to-day 
as we ever shall be and stand no chance of a 
tuneful impulse if we wait for ever so long. 



249 



DEC 5 W^ 



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